From Cloud to Home

Before I had a home server, I used to run my operations in “cloud” based applications like Replit and Google Drive . This was an obvious choice to avoid having to pay and at the time having to face Comcast’s security warning when I tried to port forward (<- I’ll get back the this later).

Now, I’ve started to move most of my stuff to my own server which is an old Acer desktop running Ubuntu Server. So far, it’s doing not bad. It’s running both my personal cloud storage as well as this very blog. What made me change from the cloud to my home?

Back to what I was saying about Comcast’s security warnings. I’ve found out that no matter what device I port forwarded even when they are unplugged, the warning kept showing up. I took the time to use virus total to test the IPs that Comcast was marking as “malware” and it showed that out of 95 engines, 6 were detecting them and ones the that detected it were ones I’d never heard of. So, I did a test run to port forward my home server for a few days and see what happens. First few days, the warnings did show up. A few more days pass by, and magically they stopped? Either the “attackers” felt bad and stopped or Comcast was just lying. Who knows. Anyways then began my journey to add my stuff to the home server.

Now, a few questions might be in your head. Like, How am I hosing both the blog and the cloud storage server on the same box with different domains? Well, I’m testing out a service called “Nginx Proxy Manager” on a raspberry pi 3B. Basically, it allows me to use the pi as a reverse proxy server and route traffic to my server. So, the service routes all traffic from the blog to the home server’s blog server that’s on a different port than the cloud server, but the user won’t know since it’s all happing on the pi. Same with the cloud storage, the pi will route traffic to the home server on a separate port without the user needing to specify the port.

Now I have full control of my services without having to rely on other cloud providers. Now, yes it will take some time out trying to maintain the server, but its fun trying to fix issues that I’ve caused or being able to fix it since it is my own server, can’t really say that when let’s say, Google Drive does down then you are left waiting for them to come back up.