this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
34 points (97.2% liked)

Selfhosted

40132 readers
546 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi everyone!

I'm looking into self-hosting, and I currently have dynamic DNS set up to point to my home IP.

My question: is it worth getting a dedicated IP through a VPN?

I'm pretty technically savvy, but when it comes to networking I lack practical experience. My thought is that pointing my domain to a dedicated IP and routing that traffic to my home IP would be safer - especially if I only allow traffic on certain ports from that IP. Just curious if that idea holds up in practice, or if it's not worth the effort.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

To provide a bit more detail then - you would setup your proxy with DNS entries "foo.example.com" as well as "bar.example.com" and whatever other sub-domains you want pointing to it. So your single IP address has multiple domain names.

Then your web browser connects to the proxy and makes a request to that server that looks like this:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: foo.example.com

nginx (or apache, or other reverse proxies) will then know that the request is specifically for "foo.example.com" even though they all point to the same computer. It then forwards the request to whatever you want on your own network and acts as a go-between between the browser and your service. This is often called something like host-based routing or virtual-hosts.

In this scenario the proxy is also the SSL endpoint and would be configured with HTTPS and a certificate that verifies that it is the source for foo.example.com, bar.example.com, etc.

[–] kakes@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago

Ahh okay, interesting. I'll have to give this a try, then.