DDOS against a little self hosted instance isn’t really a concern I’d have. I’d be more concerned with the scraping of private information, ransomware, password compromises, things of that nature. If you keep your edge devices on the latest security patches and you are cognizant on what you are exposing and how, you’ll be fine.

I feel like you have the wrong idea of what hacking acting a actually is… But yes, as long as you don’t do anything too stupid line forwarding all of your ports or going without any sort of firewall, the chances of you getting hacked are very low…

As for DDOSing, you can get DDOSed with or without self hosting all the same, but I wouldn’t worry about it.

Hey no to be harsh or anything but did you actually made your research? Plenty of people self host websites on their house without AWS , Google or Cloudfare and it works fine.

A VPS with fail2ban is all you need really. Oh and don’t make ssh accounts where the username is the password. That’s what I did once, but the hackers were nice, they closed the hole and then just used it to run a irc client because the network and host was so stable.

Found out by accident, too bad they left their irc username and pw in cleartext. Was a fun week or so messing around with their channels

I host a handful of Internet facing sites/applications from my NAS and have had no issues. Just make sure you know how to configure your firewall correctly and you’ll be fine.

Why would anyone ddos you? Ddos costs money andor effort. Noone is going to waste that on you. Maybe dos but not ddos. And the troll will go away after some time as well. There’s no gain in dosing you. Why would anyone hack your static website? For the lulz? If everything is https encrypted on your local net how does a hacker infest everything on your network?

I have servers on Digital Ocean and Linode and also one in my basement, and have had no problem. I do have all services behind NPM (not to suggest it’s a panacea) and use HTTPS/SSH for everything. (not to suggest HTTPS/SSH are either) My use case could be different than yours - my immediate family are my only consumers - but have been running the same services in those locations for a few years now without issue.

If you are afraid of being ddosed which is very unlikely. Cloudflare has free ddos protection. You can put some but not all things behind their proxy.

Also instead of making things publicly available look in to using a VPN. Wireguard with “wireguard easy” makes this very simple.

VLANs do not make you network magically more secure. But when setup correctly can increase security a load if something has already penetrated the network. But also just to streamline a network and allow or deny some parts of the network.

Firewall, Auth on all services, diligent monitoring, network segmentation (vlans are fine), and don’t leave any open communications ports, and you’ll be fine.

Further steps would be intrusion detecting/banning like crowdsec for whatever apps leave world accessible. Maybe think about running a BSD host and using jails.

If you are behind CGNAT and use some tunnel (Wireguard, Tailscale, etc.) to access your services which are running on Docker containers, the attack vector is almost not existing.

Other than the low chance of you being targeted I would say only expose your services through something like Wireguard. Other than the port being open attackers won’t know what it’s for. Wireguard doesn’t respond if you don’t immediately authenticate.

Of course security comes with layers, and if you’re not comfortable hosting services publically, use a VPN.

However, 3 simple rules go a long way:

1. Treat any machine or service on a local network as if they were publically accesible. That will prevent you from accidentally leaving the auth off, or leaving the weak/default passwords in place.

2. Install services in a way that they are easy to patch. For example, prefer phpmyadmin from debian repo instead of just copy pasting the latest official release in the www folder. If you absolutely need the latest release, try a container maintained by a reasonable adult. (No offense to the handful of kids I’ve known providing a solid code, knowledge and bugreports for the general public!)

3. Use unattended-upgrades, or an alternative auto update mechanism on rhel based distros, if you don’t want to become a fulltime sysadmin. The increased security is absolutely worth the very occasional breakage.

4. You and your hardware are your worst enemies. There are tons of giudes on what a proper backup should look like, but don’t let that discourage you. Some backup is always better than NO backup. Even if it’s just a copy of critical files on an external usb drive. You can always go crazy later, and use snapshotting abilities of your filesystem (btrfs, zfs), build a separate backupserver, move it to a different physical location… sky really is the limit here.

Use a firewall like OPNsense and you’ll be fine. There’s a Crowdsec plugin to help against malicious actors, and for the most part, nothing you’re doing is worth the trouble to them.

You can simply set up a VPN for your home network (e.g. Tailscale, Netbird, Headscale, etc.) and you won’t have to worry about attacks. Public services require a little more work, you will need to rely on a service from a company, either a tunnel (e.g. Tailscale funnel) or a VPS.

Yeah na, put your home services in Tailscale, and for your VPS services set up the firewall for HTTP, HTTPS and SSH only, no root login, use keys, and run fail2ban to make hacking your SSH expensive. You’re a much smaller target than you think - really it’s just bots knocking on your door and they don’t have a profit motive for a DDOS.

From your description, I’d have the website on a VPS, and Immich at home behind TailScale. Job’s a goodun.