Alright, sounds good. What firewall are you recommending me to use? I would like to use a firewall that’s easy to manage.

Edit: I went with ufw.

Does iptables count as a firewall? You said that I should “forget” iptables. Is it that bad? It came preinstalled on the VPS. Should I switch? And if so, how?

I have no idea how to properly manage the firewall with Hetzner. I’ve opened the ports on the Hetzner management page and I ran several iptables commands to allow traffic from those ports. Still doesn’t work. This is weird!

Not really, pinging my homeserver via the VPS returns:

PING 10.0.0.2 (10.0.0.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
From 10.0.0.1 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable
ping: sendmsg: Destination address required
From 10.0.0.1 icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable
ping: sendmsg: Destination address required
^C
--- 10.0.0.2 ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 0 received, +2 errors, 100% packet loss, time 1019ms

Hey, thank you for your blog post. I’m definitely reconsidering my choices with Cloudflare tunnels. I will take a look at the VPS setup. Privacy is something that I really care about, so this would be pretty useful. I would definitely be ready to pay 3.29€ per month for the privacy aspects of this setup.

Thanks! I’m glad that I could show you some other services!

If you have a domain and connected it to Cloudflare, you can assign tunnels to specific subdomains. For example, I have Invidious running locally on my server with port 3000. I connected the server with a Cloudflare tunnel and pointed invidious.reallyaweso.me to http://192.168.0.17:3000, which is my local IP.

I prefer owning my server hardware than renting a VPS. I completely forgot that I couldn’t port forward in my home network, so Cloudflare was my last-minute solution to that problem.

Thank you for pointing these things out! I’ve removed Dockge from Uptime Kuma.

Thank you! I appreciate the feedback!

I know, I just added the speed test because I can. If people want to use it, they can.

Is a Pentium powerful enough? I recently found a YouTube channel called “Wolfgang’s Channel” and he also has a home server with a Pentium. He says it is plenty enough for these kind of tasks.

I’ve noticed the same thing. Every Intel N100-based machine costs ~200€ on Amazon.

but the SD cards don’t last long

This is what scares me the most. Ideally, I want a whole SSD to store data. I really don’t want to lose any important data. I plan on hosting public services (like the services I’ve mentioned above) under my domain, so having a reliable drive would be really helpful.

I’ve never heard of Intel N100 before, what’s that? Just so you know, a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 Gigabytes of RAM costs ~90€ in my country (Germany). I wouldn’t really count that as overpriced. Could you show me some machine examples with Intel N100?

Njalla doesn’t seem to be a good option according to this comment on a privacy-focused forum.

What kind of TLD did you buy? Did you choose a TLD that’s supported by the WHOIS privacy? I wanted to see if alexpewmaster.de was available, and it told me this:

⚠️   PRIVACY WARNING ⚠️

This TLD does not allow WHOIS privacy but generally redacts your personal information. This means that your personal contact information will be sent to the registry but it should not be made public.

I want my private information to be hidden in Whois requests. Also, I don’t want to buy a domain from a registrar that seems very sketchy.

Sounds awesome! I’ve taken a look at Portainer and got confused on the whole Business Edition and Community Edition. What are you running?

What is Portainer? You’ve said that it’s a web UI, but what exactly does it provide you with?