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.

  • r.EndTimes@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    well, i have a lot of stuff running on it fine for the last 3 months, and lowendtalk is what I trust, I made a thread there asking about it and ppl trusted them.

    You use a virtualizer panel and they provision from cogent, its pretty straightforward what you’re getting and you can stress test it or whatever? Do you only trust the major players like digital ocean, aws, etc.?