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?
Hosting a VPN is going to be the easiest and most secure option. There are a lot of little things that might make exposing Jellyfin tricky and could risk exposing traffic.
I would suggest starting out with a simple Wireguard VPN, which has worked for me for a while, but eventually you might consider looking at Tailscale, which simplifies a lot of it. (You can completely self host it using the Headscale server). OpenVPN has more options and its a little easier to add more devices, but it’s not as fast.
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.
To Hijack this: If I wanted to host a public instance of jellyfin at jellyfin.mydomain.xyz, I would then need a dDNS hosted on my server, and then…? If I want to allow non-technical people to access my instances, how do I manage that? Could you point me to a guide that explains the overarching requirements that one would need for that, with a mention of examples for each service I need to host that I need to achoeve this? Because I am a bit lost atm :p
If you are running Jellyfin on a computer at home you’ll need to configure your dns with your dns provider to point to your home public ip then configure your router to forward port 443 to your Jellyfin server.
And this works even with a dynamic/non-static IP? I thought there was more hassle involved :D
No, if you don’t have a static IP, you will need to use a dynamic DNS solution.
You might also investigate ipv6 if your ISP provides it. Often, if they don’t give you a static ipv4 address, they might assign you a static block of ipv6 addresses you can use. That makes a big assumption that you can always use ipv6 though!