I’ve recently migrated away from iOS to GrapheneOS and I need a way to have a family shared calendar and reminders. I’m thinking NextCloud because I don’t really know of anything else.
I’ve been doing some research and I’m a bit overwhelmed since I have never self hosted before and I’m not too familiar with these technologies. I have an old HP ProDesk with an old i3, 4GB of RAM, and 120 GB SSD that I was hoping to use intermittently until I get a newer machine. I want to be able to expose the instance to the wider internet so we (my partner and I) can access it on the go, but I’m worried about messing it up. I was reading that I need a reverse proxy as bare minimum, but do I also need fail2ban, Anubis (or Go Away), and special UFW rules? I got as far as installing NextCloud with podman on Ubuntu Server 26.04.01 LTS and I can access it locally, but I’m not sure how to get move forward.
Ideally I would like to have a bash script that sets everything up with user data being handled by an external drive so I can easily reproduce it to a new machine later down the line and facilitate backups. I’m not married to Ubuntu and I am open to using something else.
I also want to run other self hosted open source services like Navidrome, Yamtrack, Standard Notes, etc. Any guidance would be appreciated.
Could you help me learn something conceptually about a reverse proxy?
My understanding is that Virtual Private Servers (vps) charge for bandwidth after you exceed a free cap.
If I set up nextcloud behind a reverse proxy, so that I’m not exposing my residential IP address to the internet, does that mean that when I upload a 500 gigabyte file, let’s say, I will incur 500 gigabytes of usage on the virtual private server?
Or is there some system where once you log in to your server, it is smart enough to make a direct connection from the client to the residential IP and bypass the reverse proxy?
In your example it would use that much and no it can’t be shortcut, that’d be a big security bug and is not intended.
The reverse proxy is just a piece of software and can be on the same machine as the actual service, but yeah, if you don’t have a public IP at home, you’ll need someone like you described and it will need the traffic.
I think there’s different software that does hole punching and actually gets you a peer to peer connection but there’s more vpn territory where the vps is just used to find a way between the peers.
For most use cases, the free traffic is usually enough though.