Why should I get a VPS over self hosting?

Fudgeknuckles98@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 31 points –

A recent post here about 4th July sales has made me consider buying a VPS but the cost still seems a little steep. What are the main advantages of using a VPS?

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That's really helpful thanks. My main reason for considering switching is for availability when outside of my home. I know I could port-foward but I am concerned about the security risks of that. I might buy one for just a month or two to see how it might help

What I do is this - and some may frown upon it because well...Cloudflare! But I use Cloudflare's tunnels to access my remote instances for my password manager, Home Assistant and a SSH shell. All of which are behind passwords and 2FA. I then have only one port open on my router, that's for my wireguard instance. I access it using my ddns and can be on my home network from anywhere.

I'd move away from the tunnels and push everything through WG, but my family is not as savvy as I am and don't always activate the tunnel when away from home. I am putting a plan for that this weekend though. :)

I managed to put my family on wireguard. I said 'install this and come to me when you are done', I finished the setup and told them 'the key icon must always be visible'. I don't know how, but it worked 🤷

Re: port-forwarding, I used traefik as a reverse proxy and that worked well (having a single domain cert instead of per service DNS is another layer but it's just obfuscation), but it's always a risk. I finally started using Tailscale after hearing about it for years and it is actually very good and deserves the hype. I had meant to setup wireguard myself but this is a lot easier. And if you don't want to use tailscale server, you can run headscale (on a cheap VPS?) instead.