I have several selfhosted services that I have been using for months, now I wish to access these while I am not at home. Likes of nextcloud, nocodb, wikijs and other media sharing self-hosted services
I would like to know what precautions should I take so no one knows that such a domain exists.
should I purchase a crazy numbered domain like 671341412312.com ? or should I go for .tk domains.
Would like to get some suggestions from this community on other aspects that I am missing.
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VPN is the way to go. Could use this opportunity to upgrade your router. I bought a box from protectli and run OPNsense on it. There’s good documentation on how to set up a wireguard vpn, and the community is vibrant.
Its also nice because there’s lots of options so its a nice thing to grow and learn with.
If the domain isn’t critical if it changes, you could use freedns.afraid.org.
I’ve been using the free version for over a decade (but did donate recently). A couple of domains have come and gone, so I’ve had to pick new ones, but it’s not a big deal.
Warning: tk domains registrar has 0 GDPR.
Might be irrelevant now, but I didn’t managed to delete my data once I wanted out
I never really understood the concept behind their free domains, but I never purchased a free/cheap domain after my first experience of getting charged 2-3 times for renewal.
However, are you talking about deletion of your personal data or your website data ?
Personal data.
They also moved a free domain that I have let expire to the paid ones, so if I wanted to renew I would have to pay… Which is kind of fair… They should also make money from somewhere…
When buying a domain read all the details: renewal fee are mentioned there. For me they were turnoffs in some cases.
I now have a .ovh as a cheap alternative. Iirc they are dirt cheap when you reserve the domain for 3 years…
This is my policy: For publicly accessible services like a website, I use a cloudflare tunnel. For restricted access to just a few users, I use a cloudflare tunnel and a cloudflare application to manage access authentication. For my exclusive restricted access to the infrastructure, I used tailscale.
I will also be using cloudlfared, but will have to look at tailscale. Really appreciate you mentioning
If you go with a cert try to get a star cert that way you make it a little bit harder for hackers to find your subdomains.
Seriously as everyone suggests: use tailscale or another VPN. Tailscale is incredbly easy to setup.
6 to 9 digit .xyz domains are only around $1 a year, every year. That’s what I did and definitely recommend it. You can read more here.
Getting an obscure domain name doesn’t matter as attackers go straight to the IP address. If you have a certificate on your secret domain name, they have your domain the moment they hit port 443.
Don’t use “security through obscurity”; instead just secure your services or host a VPN.
Try using Tailscale. It’s easy to use & free for personal use. It will only allow devices with Tailscale installed to view your self-hosted services. They have clients for mobile devices, PC’s, Mac’s and even Apple TV etc. Their technology is based on Wireguard so it’s very fast and secure.
ZeroTeir (or a VPN) - if all you want is to access those services from outside your network
IMO - the only reason to put something “on the internet” is so that the entire “internet” can access it
this ^ I use ZeroTier, and then point subdomains under my personal domain name at the ZeroTier IP for each of my devices. Then I can use those hostnames but no one else can, and name based virtual hosting is easy via wildcard sub-sub-domains
For example plex.desktop.mydomain.com -> *.desktop.mydomain.com -> desktop.mydomain.com -> 10.x.x.x
Use tailscale
- install opnsense
- set up geoip block where only IPs from your own country can ever initiate connection from the outside
- keep your stuff up to date
- enjoy security
Crazy number domain doesn’t provide any security but you can buy a 1.111B class .XYZ domain for as cheap as 0,62USD a year
VPN would be the quick and dirty
If it’s just select items, an service like azure app proxy maybe
You could use Zerotier. With zerotier you can create a private network between your server and as many as 24 other devices (i.e your phone, your laptop…)
It doesn’t expose your stuff to the whole internet. You have to manually approve the devices you want to add to the private network through zerotier website. Even if you share the links with other people, they will simply not work
I just did this for my Raspberry pi, and now pihole filters my internet traffic even when I’m away.
Seriously, look it up, it’s free up to 25 connections and since it’s private you don’t need to go crazy about protecting your server from DDoS or buying a domain name or anything.