themachinestopsA single point of failure triggered the Amazon outage affecting millions
Reminder to everyone, if you aren’t necessarily worried about uptime too much, and have a spare device at home, you can host personal websites and various services that might be useful for yourself or friends and family. To keep it simple, all you would really need is
- an up-to-date router that isn’t end-of-life
- a firewall that geo blocks traffic from outside your country and blocks all ports except 80 and 443
- port forwarding 80 and 443 to your device
- setup dynamic dns service (some routers can handle this)
- a domain name
Keep your device and router updated and reboot it every once in a while to load the updated kernel. Then just install some web server software or whatever on your device and point your domain to it.
Together, we can decentralize the web a little bit 🙂
As a novice DON’T put your devices on the open Internet. Use something like tailscale or Splittunnel. You can give your friends access through that.
Thats why I suggested an up-to-date router that isn’t end-of-life. If you keep your router firmware updated, your firewall on, and your “server” updated, then you are as protected as any VPS that has ever been deployed.
Tailscale is centralized and prevents you from accessing your devices if it goes down, which is what the OP points out. If we want some decentralization, we can configure our current equipment to do so. Its not so difficult if you spend some time reading your router’s documentation and keep everything behind it updated. NAT routing is pretty good at keeping bad things out.