Skip Navigation

Is it considered bad practice to expose selfhosted services on public internet?

I see a lot of people here uses some form of remote access tool (VPN/Tailscale) to access their home network when not at home. I can’t really do this because my phone (iOS) can only activate one VPN profile at a time, and I often need this for other stuff.

So I chose to expose most web based services on the public internet, behind Authelia. But I don’t know how safe this is.

What I’m really unsure are things like Vaultwarden: while the web interface is protected by Authelia (even use 2FA), its API address needs to be bypassed for direct access, otherwise the mobile APP won’t work. It feels like this is negative everything I’ve done so far.

24

You're viewing a single thread.

24 comments
  • It's not bad per se, but you really just need to understand the risks involved and have an idea of how to secure your services properly. I personally won't expose anything if it doesn't have some sort of centralized auth solution (LDAP preferred) and 2FA to better secure accounts.

    It's also good practice to have some way of mitigating brute-force attacks with something like fail2ban, and a way to outright block known bad IP addresses.

24 comments