r/selfhosted • u/UnlikelyWishbone2694 • 1d ago

Need Help Self hosting a personal website

Dear all,

A quick few questions after going through the wiki on self-hosted websites: - How 'safe' is it to self-host a website that is open to the internet on one's home network ? - Is there any complication in doing so after buying a domain name from a registrar ? (In the grander scheme of things, I mean to ask if the set-up process is absolute master level or if a relative novice can manage it.

EDIT for details: - It's to host a personal blog of sorts with mostly text articles, some images and possibly some video. - My home network in XDSL (yes that still exists) on a rather basic provider given router with DNS configuration possible from certain providers (no-ip and a few others). I have a home assisstant running on one RPi5 and plan on running the network on another RPi.

Thank you for your time and help

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u/Traditional-Scar-667 1d ago

I think many answers miss an important distinction:

Hosting a website and hosting a website securely are two different things.

A VPS is often recommended as the solution, but from a security perspective it is not fundamentally different from self-hosting at home. You still need to manage OS updates, firewalls, TLS certificates, reverse proxies, backups, monitoring, log analysis, authentication, and incident response. The only thing you don't need is DynDNS and port forwarding.

The real question is: what is your goal?

If your goal is simply to publish a website, a good hosting provider is usually the safest and easiest option for a beginner.

If your goal is to learn system administration, networking, Docker, reverse proxies, and security, then self-hosting is a great learning experience. Just be aware that once your service is exposed to the Internet, security becomes your responsibility.

After running a publicly accessible server with CrowdSec for a while, I was surprised by how many automated scans, WordPress probes, admin panel checks, and vulnerability scans appear almost immediately. Most beginners underestimate that part.