Sorry re-reading my comments it’s not super clear what I meant: nowhere else in the table do they take account for the ‘hidden’ on-going maintenance of looking after a server/self-hosting. So this is the only row where they address ‘cost’ and I just thought it’s a bit optimistic to say replacing all of Spotify just costs a one time server setup and storage. I think you’re saying this row was only meant to indicate financial cost and I agree it’s basically accurate from that meaning. However this is only the ‘initial’ cost. For example a self-hosted server and storage will eventually have to be replaced whereas Spotify will just keep replacing their own servers and that’s already baked into the price of your subscription (caveat: that Spotify price will rise over time).

It’s not a big point really, maybe I’m nitpicking.

I see what you’re saying but nowhere else in that table is cost mentioned. Below the table they say maintanance is minimal. If you’re already looking after storage, containers and server(s) I guess that could be true.

Author says “one-time server setup + storage” but there are a few moving parts and always updates to handle so I’m sceptical this could be truly called ‘one time’ (or any selfhosting). Time will tell I guess. I enjoyed the article though and gave me food for thought.

Was this comment meant for a different conversation? We’re talking about VPNs here.

I’ve got probably 30+ households of people and multiply that by number of devices…this is also something that will only be live for 12 months maybe. I think if I was doing something long-lived it might be worth the effort to get everyone onto VPN but for this…just can’t justify the time. Thanks anyway.

Hey thanks for this. Yep I’ve got too many users and most are not technical so it’s just a huge headache to get them all onto VPN not matter how simple. That said I’d consider tailscale/funnel for other projects and it’s always good to hear what others are using.

👍 looks like its fairly easy to add something like ModSecurity WAF to nginx

Thought process is: Peertube or some other service’s first job is the purpose for the service, so security likely won’t be as good as a service who’s first job is security.

Really good point. I see many selfhost instructions now that say ‘we don’t bother with HTTPS, just use a proxy to handle that’ and maybe auth should go the same way as in there’s good solutions that specialise in auth so it’s not worth each project doing it themselves.

apps can’t deal with hitting Authentik 1st afaik

Another good consideration. There is an early Peertube app but I doubt my users will be using it, web access is fine for this. Perhaps apps for things like Lemmy/Mastodon/Peertube etc will need to work better with these auth frontends in future.

Thanks for this suggestion - this is interesting because it looks like pangolin combines almost all the measures mentioned so far here apart from Anubis: auth provider with one-time email passcodes, geoip blocking, crowdsec plus bonus automated cert handling. It does look like it does nearly everything in one package and I can pay for them to host it for me if I don’t want to selfhost those parts. Strong contender!

Really good point. I can definitely restrict to one country and anyone using their own VPNs/TOR/whatever will be sophisticated enough to understand why its restricted and how to keep their access.

Super useful thanks!

Good to hear Anubis is effective - I would hope that takes the site out of the ‘easy target’ sort of category and most bots give up. Yeah I think monitoring is gonna be key to keep an eye on threats. Thanks!

I had to look up NPM as in my head it’s NodeJS Package Manager but TIL there’s also Nginx Proxy Manager!

I like your VPN solution for a small group and actually tying it to their home network/router could make sense and further restrict attacks I have to deal with. However in my case I could be dealing with 30+ households of users and as others say I am bound to get people on mobiles complaining they can’t access it. However noted for future projects.

That’s a great suggestion, then I’m not relying just on the app/service to have super secure auth.

Hey thanks for these links I will check them out! Magic links would be great actually as then I am not relying on them to set decent passwords or giving them burden of TOTP/etc which some may not have used before.

This is similar using nix: https://devenv.sh/

It has a few more features like git hooks and spinning up long-running processes like web servers