I understand that people enter the world of self hosting for various reasons. I am trying to dip my toes in this ocean to try and get away from privacy-offending centralised services such as Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc.
As I spend more time here, I realise that it is practically impossible; especially for a newcomer, to setup any any usable self hosted web service without relying on these corporate behemoths.
I wanted to have my own little static website and alongside that run Immich, but I find that without Cloudflare, Google, and AWS, I run the risk of getting DDOSed or hacked. Also, since the physical server will be hosted at my home (to avoid AWS), there is a serious risk of infecting all devices at home as well (currently reading about VLANS to avoid this).
Am I correct in thinking that avoiding these corporations is impossible (and make peace with this situation), or are there ways to circumvent these giants and still have a good experience self hosting and using web services, even as a newcomer (all without draining my pockets too much)?
Edit: I was working on a lot of misconceptions and still have a lot of learn. Thank you all for your answers.
This is nonsense. A small static website is not going to be hacked or DDOSd. You can run it off a cheap ARM single board computer on your desk, no problem at all.
What?
I’ve popped up a web server and within a day had so many hits on the router (thousands per minute) that performance tanked.
Yea, no, any exposed service will get hammered. Frankly I’m surprised that machine I setup didn’t get hacked.
You left stuff exposed is the only explanation. I’ve had services running for years without a problem
What class of IP was it?
Don’t leave SSH on port 22 open as there are a lot of crawlers for that, otherwise I really can’t say I share your experience, and I have been self-hosting for years.
I’ve been self-hosting a bunch of stuff for over a decade now, and have not had that issue.
Except for a matrix server with open registration for a community that others not in the community started to use.
Yes my biggest mistake was leaving a vps dns server wide open. It took months for it to get abused though.
Lol
I can’t say I’ve seen anything like that on the webservers I’ve exposed to the internet. But it could vary based on the IP you have if it’s a target for something already I suppose.
How could it if all you had was a basic webserver running?