this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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If you don’t mind me asking, how do you host your site?
Buy the cheapest laptop you can find, with a broken screen it's fine. Install debian 12 on it give it a memorable name, like "server" go to a DNS registrar of your choice, maybe "porkbun" and buy your internet DNS name for example "MyInternetWebsite.tv", this will cost you 20$/30$ for the rest of your life, or until we finally abolish the DNS system to something less extortionnate Install webmin and then apache on it go to your router, give the laptop a static address in the DNS section Some router do no have the ability to apply a static dhcp lease to computers on your network, in that case it will be more complicated or you will have to buy a new one, one that preferably supports openwrt. then go to port forwarding and forward the ports 80 and 443 to the address of the static dhcp lease now use puttygen to create a private key, copy that public key to your linux laptop's file called /root/.ssh/authorized_keys go to the webmin interface, which can be accessed with http://server.lan:10000/ from any computer on your PC and setup dynamic dns, this will make the DNS record for MyInternetWebsite.tv change when the IP of your internet connection changes, which can happen at any time, but usually rarely does. But you have to, or else when it changes again, your website and email will stop working. Now go to your desktop computer, and download winsshfs, put in your private key and mount the folder /var/www/html/ to a drive letter like "T:" Now, whatever you put in T: , will be the content of your very own internet web server enjoy
While i appreciate the detailed response here i did make another comment letting OP know i'm in a similiar situation as them, i use Docker Engine & Docker Compose for my self-hosting needs on a 13th Gen Asus Nuc (i7 model) running Proxmox with a Debian 12 VM. My reverse proxy is traefik and i am able to receive SSL certificates on port :80/:443 (also have Fail2Ban setup) however, i can't for the life of me figure out how to expose my containers to the internet.
On my iPhone over LTE/5G trying my domain leads to an "NSURLErrorDomain" and my research of this error doesn't give me much clarity. Edit appears to be a 503 error.
This is a snippet of my docker-compose.yml
Hi,
The internal port will also be the same as the external port 80 and 443. If the router is running in bridge mode, that would mean that your dhcp, dns and nat is happening on the upstream router. That means you will have to go to the upstream router to setup the port forwarding.
Also depending on how it works internally with the VPN. It might try to port forward the ports on the VPN's ip address Which none of the VPN I tried allowed to port forward port 80 and 443
With a linux or openwrt router this could be as easy as the following
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.199:80 iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.199:443
But the problem with store bought router is that every one of them has a different way of doing the things so it gets confusing really fast.
All of this confusion about port forwarding was engineered to discourage ordinary people from using their internet to host their own files and instead because cloud-dependant techno-serfs.
Another way, would be to go on the forum low end talk and obtain a VPS, and host your apache server there. That would work, but you would be back to renting someone else's computer (aka cloud bull) but it's still better than paying squarespace about it.
Keep at it, you'll figure it out, it's actually very easy once you know all the complicated bits, I do it all the time.
I host it via docker+nginx on my own hardware.
I’m in the same boat (sorta)!
Follow up question, did you have trouble exposing port :80 & :443 to the internet? Also are you also using Swarm or Kubernetes?
I have the docker engine setup on a machine along side Traefik (have tried Nginx in the past) primarily using Docker Compose and it works beautifully on LAN however I can’t seem to figure out why I can’t connect over the internet, I’m forced to WireGuard/VPN into my home network to access my site.
No need to provide troubleshooting advice, just curious on your experience.
I keep everything as flat as possible. Just the regular docker (+compose) package running on vanilla Debian. On the networking side, I’m lucky in that I have a government-run fiber provider that doesn’t care that much what I host, so it’s just using the normal ports.
I did previously use C*mcast, and I remember there was an extra step I had to do to get it to redirect port 80 over 443, but I couldn’t tell you what that step was anymore.