I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. My current ADHD hyperfixation is NodeBB, but I think my questions fit most anything that you want to be available to the general public and not just yourself and your friends.

Basically, I want to host a NodeBB instance intended for the general public out of my house. What are the risks of doing this? In particular, what are the risks of doling out a web address that points to my personal IP address? Is this even a good idea? Or should I just rent a VPS? This is 80% me wanting to improve my sysadmin skills, and 20% me wanting to create a community.

I have a DMZ in place. Hosts in the DMZ cannot reach the LAN, but LAN hosts can reach the DMZ. If necessary, I can make sure DMZ hosts can’t communicate with each other.

I have synchronous 1 Gb fiber internet. Based on the user traffic of similar forums, I don’t anticipate a crush of people.

I know the basics of how to set up a NodeBB instance, and I’ve successfully backed up and restored an instance on another machine.

I’m not 100% on things like HTTPS certs. I can paste a certbot command from a tutorial, that’s it.

Anything else I should know? Thanks!

EDIT:

I also have a domain, a couple of them, actually. They’re like potato chips; you can’t stop at just one.

I don’t plan on self-hosting email used for forum registration and announcements. I’m not a masochist.

EDIT for future readers:

I think for now I’m not going to self host anything I intend to be accessed by the public. While I pay the internet bill, my name is on the account, and I own all the equipment, I’m not the only member of this household, so it would be somewhat inconsiderate of me to share our bandwidth with public traffic. In general I think those warning against self-hosting resources one intends to be accessed by the general public are pretty sound.

I tried the Cloudflare tunnel suggestion, but it doesn’t seem to play nice with NodeBB. I can access the forum, even over HTTPS, but I can’t log in. Some quick googling leads me to believe it has something to do with web sockets. The first fix I found involves exposing my IP, which defeats the purpose of using a cloudflare tunnel. There may be a way around it, but I frankly can’t be bothered.