listen to my podcast, guys. /s

The entire point of selfhost is to host private services not available to the public. By literal definition, that’s allowing only local traffic to connect to your services. It’s infinitely more secure. A VPN allows you to extend those services over the clearnet to authorized devices via virtualized networks. You don’t have to worry about messing with inbound/outbound ports, or worrying about software failure or misconfigurations accidentally exposing you to the clearnet. You don’t have to worry about DDoS, or abuse. Being attacked? Bring down your VPN and that completely shuts down your issue. Your network is completely unreachable by anyone but a local host.

There’s simply no room for an argument. VPN is objectively better in all possible situations.

I don’t know what kind of firewall you use, but if my firewall is down there is NO traffic at all passing through!

Only a hardware firewall would do this. If it’s software, like implied in your post, no traffic is filtered and all connections are accepted.

VPN is the least amount of work for the most secure setup. There’s nothing to even argue, its superior in every way.

There is. It’s called VPN Split Tunneling.

If you want to proxify your connection between you and a service, you enable the split. If you don’t care, or want to not use the VPN, then disable it for that application. So it’s effectively “proxify all connections to this app,” which is the same as your use case.

This is effectively the same damn thing with a single exception. If your VPN is down, there’s no access to your server. If for whatever reason your firewall is down, there’s unrestricted access to your server…

VPN is unquestionably the correct choice 100 times out of 100.

You may say that’s a good practice to separate things

You’re missing the point. VPN isn’t about separating anything… I’m not even sure what you mean by that. VPN is the accepted practice here. Unquestionably. You create private services, and for security you only expose them to the least amount of people possible. You authenticate via VPN connections. You only have to maintain a single database of users to access any number of services, even tens of thousands.

OP is specifically talking about hosting local content that they want to protect. VPN is the solution here.

Your use case, and OPs, are completely different scenarios. I can’t tell if you’re being purposefully disingenuous or just flippantly stupid.

Why not swap from nginx-proxy-manager to Caddy2, which can handle everything? SSL and reverse_proxy?

If somebody needs to have services accessible by someone else besides him, that service can’t be behind a VPN

Again, this is the reason VPNs exist. If that person needs access, then setup Wireguard…

It’s like saying you don’t need a front gate with an access code because then you would have to give out your own access code. But I mean, the lock has the ability to setup more access codes. And you’re saying the only viable option is the leave the gate open and hire a guard to manage access. It’s just… Weird and wrong.

I preach this to people everywhere I go and seldom do they listen. There’s no reason for object storage for a non-enterprise environment. Using it in homelabs is just…mostly insane…

Cryptpad is basically a frontend to ONLYOFFICE web. It’s nice, but ONLYOFFICE requires quite a bit of system resources because its java based. As an alternative, I highly recommend WPS Office instead. Significantly more lightweight. It’s an application for Portainer-EE, too. So it’s basically a 1 click install.

By not making them publicly accessible. With Wireguard there’s really no reason.

Setup service to be active on a subnet, enable Wireguard to VPN into the subnet and use the services.

Jellyfin hosted on my primary PC with access to my GPU (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060) for transcoding. The Jellyfin libraries instance SMB shares on my NAS. Stream everything with Jellyfin for Chromecast right from the TV.

Works amazingly well. Great transcoding times. No lag despite only having 10/100/1000 NIC on NAS and streaming WiFi with Chromecast.

I manage the media library with TMM (tinymediamanager).

Super happy with it, particularly considering the only thing it cost me was the NAS (because I game on my PC anyways) which I was also going to get, anyways.

Check out MinIO. It’s S3 compatible, so generally any tool which works with S3 will work with your instance. You can pair it with other FOSS applications like rclone. It’s a great combo.

Update came through this morning. 7.2.2-72806 Update 3.

The one thing I’ll never recommend anyone selfhost is email. It’s just plain not worth it.

You can do literally everything right and still get cucked by spam filters because you’re not a recognized email provider.

https://forums.lawrencesystems.com/t/freenas-truenas-zfs-pools-raidz-raidz2-raidz3-capacity-integrity-and-performance/3569

As someone who’s set up and managed critical business applications I would say that it’s perfectly fine to host your own provided you have decent hardware that’s capable of doing what you need and as a dedicated business line to provide connection.

If you try to run mission critical business applications on a home internet connection you’re going to have a really bad fucking time. But hosting business critical applications on appropriate hardware and a 1Gb/s business connection with an SLA is going to meet 95-98%% of all business applications.

If something like that sounds expensive or too difficult to do then it’s too expensive or too difficult for you to host yourself. Just go with a provider and sidestep self-host.

Debian, baby.

Chest freezers are exceptionally energy efficient. It’s not a very good comparison.