(I asked this on r*ddit a long while ago, but I don’t think I explained myself properly)

Basically, I would like to host a few services on my own metal (and not anywhere else in the world!) to play around with and learn, like my personal site, lemmy instance, vpn, fdroid, image host, etc etc.

I would also like to hide my public IP address because I don’t want people who connect to me to know my location (even if it’s rather coarse).

I know that this isn’t possible without at least another server in a different physical location, but I really have no idea how to approach this. What software do I run? What is this action called? What do any of these AWS/Azure service names mean? How much would I realistically need to pay? Etc etc.

Anyone have any pointers?

  • dap@lemmy.onlylans.ioEnglish
    62·
    1 year ago

    Cloudflare free tier + a reverse proxy will set you straight. You can add subdomains for your services as A records in Cloudflare off of your root domain, i.e. lemmy.yourdomain.tld, personalsite.yourdomain.tld, images.yourdomain.tld.

    When doing this, enable the Cloudflare DNS proxy which will route DNS requests to your origin service through Cloudflares’s CDN. This essentially “hides” your public IP as anyone doing a nslookup lemmy.yourdomain.tld will get Cloudflares’s IPs back as a response.

    Once you’ve done this, you can break everything back out to it’s respective backend via a reverse proxy. For example, lemmy.yourdomain.tld gets passed to 192.168.0.10, personalsite.yourdomain.tld gets passed to 192.168.0.20, etc.

    • augentism@thaumatur.geEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      That’s sounds so much simpler than what I am doing right now. Right now I have a digital ocean droplet server running openvpn and I have any servers I want open to the internet connecting to that openvpn server as a client. I then NAT all incoming traffic to the servers I have with iptables as if the droplet is a router. Is it much easier to setup a cloudflare tunnel? Or am I basically accomplishing the same thing? Will I be able to run all the other services I have because I’m not just web hosting? I also do not have a static IP.