> I decided to explore self-hosting some of my non-critical applications
Self-hosting static or almost-static websites is now really easy with a Cloudflare front. I just closed my account on SmugMug and published my images locally using my NAS; this costs no extra money (is basically free) since the photos were already on the NAS, and the NAS is already powered on 24-7.
The NAS I use is an Asustor so it's not really Linux and you can't install what you want on it, but it has Apache, Python and PHP with Sqlite extension, which is more than enough for basic websites.
Cloudflare free is like magic. Response times are near instantaneous and setup is minimal. You don't even have to configure an SSL certificate locally, it's all handled for you and works for wildcard subdomains.
And of course if one puts a real server behind it, like in the post, anything's possible.
do they ever publish an actual number on this? given the size of HTML documents v.s. images, I imagine its something thats something that can be exceeded very easily without knowing..
e.g. is running a personal photography website OK?
You could also use openVPN or wireguard and not have a man in the middle for no reason.
I have a VPN on a raspberry pi and with that I can connect to my self hosted cloud, dev/staging servers for projects, gitlab and etc when I’m not on my home network.
I believe the suggested setup was for making a site and images available to the public, for which hiding the origin behind Cloudflare seems a very good reason. Some public IP will need to have ports 443/80 open.
That requires opening a firewall port on router. For some people, that might not be possible. Either due to ISP restrictions such as CGNAT. In those cases, they're better off using something like Tailscale.
The web server of the nas is exposed to the Internet (port forwarding of 80 from the router to the nas); the rest of the nas is not exposed / not accessible from outside the LAN.
The images that are published are low-res versions copied to a directory on a partition accessible to the web server.
This is not the safest solution, as it does punch a hole in the lan... It's kind of an experiment... We'll see how it goes.
I'm aware they wrap OSS, but they made it very, very easy to adopt and maintain for a large chunk of potential users. This requires significant effort and should not be undervalued, in my opinion.
exactly, which means setting up a vps, generating certificates, setting up some type of monitoring to make sure the tunnel is working, etc. I agree that wireguard is the best option, if you have the time and knowledge, but for some dev people that just wants to put up a webpage with a few users, tailscale/cloudflare is a much easier system to maintain (especially as it handles ssl for you as well - to some degree...).
Self-hosting static or almost-static websites is now really easy with a Cloudflare front. I just closed my account on SmugMug and published my images locally using my NAS; this costs no extra money (is basically free) since the photos were already on the NAS, and the NAS is already powered on 24-7.
The NAS I use is an Asustor so it's not really Linux and you can't install what you want on it, but it has Apache, Python and PHP with Sqlite extension, which is more than enough for basic websites.
Cloudflare free is like magic. Response times are near instantaneous and setup is minimal. You don't even have to configure an SSL certificate locally, it's all handled for you and works for wildcard subdomains.
And of course if one puts a real server behind it, like in the post, anything's possible.