this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Why is starting with Self-hosting so daunting? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by Ieris19@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.

I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.

I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)

Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.

Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.

Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!

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[–] Acktung@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Self-hosting is like any other topic in computing. You have to read, read and read. If you want to self-host a reverse proxy, go to the official documentation of the reverse proxy. What you are doing is searching for magic recipes in blogs and YouTube, that is why you feel it so "daunting".

[–] Ieris19@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Quite the contrary, I’m stuck at finding a reverse proxy in the first place. If I didn’t know nginx had a reverse proxy, which is the only one I know about, where would I even start finding the docs? I can’t repeat this enough, but I rarely ever do tutorials, I find them basic and lackluster

I don’t think I need specifically a reverse proxy rn so I don’t really have a clue about that kind of service specifically, but even finding WHAT to use to do an authoritative DNS was a challenge in its own right that I only solved somewhere else in this thread.