Selfhosted

The only thing that can get hacked is something that responds on the World Wide Web.

So you limit the scope of what talks to the WWW:

Wireguard VPN will not respond unless the magic keys are correct, it’s ideal security and obscurity. Put everything you can behind it.

For things I want on the WWW without a VPN, I split out two options otherwise.

1. Caddy checking mTLS certificates that basically allows a device access without extra steps - relying on Caddy to be strong and mTLS to be strong.

2. Authentik’s proxy check, I think Authelia has this too, but to access a site you hit an Authentik login first.

For both of those, you rely on those services not having 0-day hacks. More likely for these services to stay ahead of the game and/or fix quick than something that doesn’t exist just to do authentication. I run them in containers that are run by independent users and are read-only with capabilities limited, in a VM.

I’d say the Caddy route is more secure than Authentik, but it needs more effort to setup the certificate stuff. Authentik route needs a web browser to log in with. Obviously the WG VPN is primo.

Damn dawg, reading this made me not wanna self host my own instance. I was considering it.

Outbound firewall and SMAC protections.

If you compromise my server you'll struggle to phone home without manual intervention, which is good enough to stop botnets.

Have a limited attack surface will reduce exposure.

If, say, the only thing that you're exposing is, oh, say, a Wireguard VPN, then unless there's a misconfiguration or remotely-exploitable bug in Wireguard, then you're fine regarding random people running exploit scanners.

I'm not too worried about stuff like (vanilla) Apache, OpenSSH, Wireguard, stuff like that, the "big" stuff that have a lot of eyes on them. I'd be a lot more dubious about niche stuff that some guy just threw together.

To put perspective on this, you gotta remember that most software that people run isn't run in a sandbox. It can phone home. Games on Steam. If your Web browser has bugs, it's got a lot of sites that might attack it. Plugins for that Web browser. Some guy's open-source project. That's a potential vector too. Sure, some random script kiddy running an exploit scanner is a potential risk, but my bet is that if you look at the actual number of compromises via that route, it's probably rather lower than plain old malware.

It's good to be aware of what you're doing when you expose the Internet to something, but also to keep perspective. A lot of people out there run services exposed to the Internet every day; they need to do so to make things work.

Yes...yet another comment. LOL Something you should do from the very start is take notes of everything you do on the server. I use Notepad++ for the rough draft while I'm setting something up. Copy/paste, write out commands, notations, what this or that does. Take prolific notes. I really can't stress that enough. That way, if you need to back out of something, or if the wheels fall off, you can go right back to your notes. Don't be lulled into the idea that you will be able to remember every last keystroke you've made. That rarely happens. Take notes.

When I have successfully deployed whatever I'm working on, then I go back, take my notes, clean them up, and place them in Obsidian and make backups of them.

It's mostly automated exploit finders looking for low hanging fruit. fail2ban and up to date software is your friend.

Dealing with this constant threat seems like it would be frightening enough as a full-time job, but this would only be a hobby project for me.

Hobbyist/Enthusiast here. Most of the bots are autonomous. They are deployed and constantly sniff for any little cracks and crevasses in the armor. Don't be fooled tho, they are quite sophisticated. I see some have mentioned fail2ban, and Crowdsec. Both are very capable. UFW (uncomplicated firewall) is also very good. When I set up UFW and my external, standalone pfsense firewall, the way I go about it is to block everything, then step by step, open only the ports that absolutely have to be opened.

Tailscale is also a great overlay vpn along with netbird. Tailscale can also be used as an emergency entry to your server should you lock yourself out, so it has multiple uses. Additionally, since you say you have technical knowledge, Cloudflare Tunnel/Zero Trust pretty much wraps everything up. I know there are a lot of selfhosters dead set against Cloudflare, so that's a decision you have to make. Cloudflare does not require you to open ports or fiddle with NAT. You set it up on your server, Cloudflare takes care of the rest. If you wanted additional protection, you could install Tailscale as an overlay on the server. The caveat to using Cloudflare Tunnel/Zero Trust is that you have to have a domain name that allows you to enter and use Cloudflare's name servers for obvious reasons. You can get a domain anywhere although Cloudflare will sell you one if you wish to go that route.

Since I am the only user of my server, I've taken the additional step of implementing the hosts.allow/hosts.deny TCP Wrapper ACL files (although you can have multiple users with hosts.allow/hosts.deny). If you go this route, make sure you do the hosts.allow, so that when you edit the hosts.deny you'll enter ALL : ALL for a default‑deny stance. For my purposes, multiple users cause multiple issues, so I don't share. :p

Probably should go without saying you should use ssh keys when administrating the server via ssh.

ETA: Hope everyone is safe in the US with this frigid weather.

ETA2: If you decide to go with Cloudflare Tunnel/Zero Trust, I have some notes that seems to have helped several people and I would be happy to share them.

The 'immediate attacks' ppl mention is just static background noise. Server / scripts that run trying to find misconfigured, highly out to date or exploitable endpoints/servers/software.

Once you update your software, set up basic brute force protection and maybe regional blocking, you do not have to worry about this kind of attack.

Much more scary are so called 0-Day attacks.

1. No one will waste an expensive exploit on you
2. It sometimes can happen that 0-Days that get public get widly exploited and take long time to get closed like for example log4shell was. Here is work necessary to inform yourself and disable things accorsing to what is patched and what not.

As i already said, no one will waste time on you, there are so much easier targets out there that do not follow those basic rules or actually valuable targets.

There is obviously more that you can do, like hiding everything behind a VPN or advanced thread detections. Also choosing the kind of software you want to run is relevant.

Only expose services internally then use a secure VPN to access your services, this makes your network no more vulnerable in practice than not self hosting. If you need/want to expose something to the internet, make sure you setup your network right. Use a DMZ to separate that service and leverage something like CrowdSec along with good passwords, antivirus, and keep things patched.

Just use tailscale and don't forward any ports and you'll be fine

By default your OS is secure. You only have to think about what you expose and how can it be broken in. Disable SSH password authentication. Don't run software that is provided by hobbyists who have no enough security expertise (i. e. random github projects with 1 or 2 contributors and any software that recommends install method curl <something> | sudo bash). Read how to harden the services you run, if it is not described in the documentation — avoid such services. Ensure that services you installed are not running under root. Better use containerized software, but don't run anything as root even inside containers. Whenever possible, prefer software from your distro official repos because maintainers likely take care about safe setup even if upstream developers don't. Automate installing security updates at the day they released.

What doesn't help:

• Security through obscurity. Changing SSH port etc. Anyone can scan open ports and find where SSH is listening.
• Antivirus. It is simply unable to detect each of numerous malicious scripts that appears every day. It just eats your system resources.The best it can do is to detect that your host is compromised, but not prevent this. It is not security, just marketing.
• Making different rules for public internet and DMZ. Consider there's no DMZ. Assume that your host can be accessed by crackers from anywhere.

I don't think you're in any danger if you are truly a human.

Your devices, OTOH...

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #1019 for this comm, first seen 25th Jan 2026, 22:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I have snort running on my firewall monitoring my LAN port. Does it help? No idea. Does it make me feel good because it blocks stuff? Yup. It does enforce IP blacklists from a feed, so it’s a start.

Keeping an loose eye on things and watching for extra network traffic, cpu, ram usage is what I do.

That's the point. It taught me things that I wouldn't learn if it weren't for that scared feeling. I agree that some sensitive things are better off my server.

You should start small and keep only things you want to be public, and services under basic logins. First logins, maybe admin admin but slowly you will get better and also place fail2ban and crowdsec. Once you have enough confidence and years of service on your belt. You can trust it with sensitive files under heavy guard.

They don't have to succeed once.

Use antivirus and other endpoint security measures. Rotate your passwords and keys. Use Everything as Code, and for goodness sake make backups.

If you find yourself compromised, rotate and burn the keys, wipe and redeploy.