this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Selfhosted

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73
Risks of self-hosting a public-facing forum? (lemmy.radio)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by early_riser@lemmy.radio to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I've wanted to do this for a long time. My current ADHD hyperfixation is NodeBB, but I think my questions fit most anything that you want to be available to the general public and not just yourself and your friends.

Basically, I want to host a NodeBB instance intended for the general public out of my house. What are the risks of doing this? In particular, what are the risks of doling out a web address that points to my personal IP address? Is this even a good idea? Or should I just rent a VPS? This is 80% me wanting to improve my sysadmin skills, and 20% me wanting to create a community.

I have a DMZ in place. Hosts in the DMZ cannot reach the LAN, but LAN hosts can reach the DMZ. If necessary, I can make sure DMZ hosts can't communicate with each other.

I have synchronous 1 Gb fiber internet. Based on the user traffic of similar forums, I don't anticipate a crush of people.

I know the basics of how to set up a NodeBB instance, and I've successfully backed up and restored an instance on another machine.

I'm not 100% on things like HTTPS certs. I can paste a certbot command from a tutorial, that's it.

Anything else I should know? Thanks!

EDIT:

I also have a domain, a couple of them, actually. They're like potato chips; you can't stop at just one.

I don't plan on self-hosting email used for forum registration and announcements. I'm not a masochist.

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[–] 3dmvr@lemm.ee -2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Its so cheap to just get a vps from a littlecreekhosting deal, I checked them all on lowendtalk and its the cheapest for highest specs, you do have to comment your invoice to double ram, but its 4 core 8gb ram for 3.50 a month and 8core 16gb 7$ cogent amd epyc, and solid ssd space 140-160 idr exactly, they have multiple deals posted, the one with the prices I mention is the best one, they also had windows vps deals. Spent way too long testing hella, its not the best ping out there for me since I'm fairly far but I'm not hosting gameservers so its a non issue.

There are many other deals on lowendtalk but they are typically for way less resources or way more expensive for a lot more resources

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

OP asks for not doing exactly that though.

[–] CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 4 points 20 hours ago

Its so cheap to just get a vps from a littlecreekhosting deal

This site seems suspicious as hell. Incredibly basic site, no info on where they're located, and the "About Us" links aren't even links. There's no About Us page.

[–] downhomechunk@midwest.social 1 points 1 day ago

I've had good luck with these guys: https://cloudfanatic.net/pricing/

I think they would fall in the less resources category. But they offer unlimited data transfer, and you can use any distro you want. I run slackware btw.