Does anyone have any advice on hosting a server to the outside world? I intend to host a Jellyfin media server and want to be able to access it remotely. I was leaning towards hosting a VPN on my network with a good password but I don’t know much about that. I am looking for a free option that ideally doesn’t require proprietary software and can be completely hosted locally. For reasons that I won’t go into, I am a little concerned about my isp seeing the traffic to the media server. I know I am being paranoid but I don’t really care. I imagine if I host it through port forwarding on the router but set up HTTPS that would encrypt the traffic and stop my ISP from seeing it, but I don’t know if hosting a VPN would be easier / more secure. Thoughts?
If you are ok with Jellyfin being public, then I would just put it in front of an nginx proxy. That way, your nginx proxy will handle SSL termination. With SSL, your ISP won’t be able to inspect the traffic directly.
If you are running docker, then I’d recommend
jwilder/nginx-proxyand its lets encrypt companionjrcs/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion. It makes putting things behind an SSL proxy very easy! This of course assumes you have a public IP address through your ISP and aren’t stuck behind CG-NAT!A second option is to keep it private then use a VPN (this is what I do). Wireguard can be a good option although setting up each device is a bit manual, since you have to generate key pairs for each of them. This also requires you have a public IP through your ISP or have a public box that bridges your public VPN to your home network. That said, it works really well.
Tailscale is a free, but commercial option built on top of wireguard that makes set up a lot easier. If you are stuck behind CG-NAT this is probably your easiest option.