I have tried on numerous occasions to get freedns.afraid.org to work for me. I would be interested in how you got it going when you do get it all worked out.

I worry that having to maintain a VPS myself is tedious and risky

I have three VPS, and a rack in the closet. As far as maintenance is concerned, once you get everything set up and secured, there’s not a whole lot to ‘maintain’, imho. I check logs, make sure all the baddies are at bay and all my good stuff is secured. I leverage technology to help me. I get a summary in the morning telling me all services are up. I do that with n8n, but you certainly could put together something more than my basic n8n flow. I use Docker containers a lot, so I have dockerbot to check that all services are up and running. Dockerbot allows me to stop/start/restart containers. I use UptimeKuma to also keep track of services and send me updates, and I use the iOS app for UptimeKuma which has a handy widget.

Once a month I run sudo apt update / sudo apt full-upgrade to make sure everything is updated. NBD there if you do it regularly and don’t skip a lot of updates/upgrades. Backups happen every night using the 3,2,1 method and backed up to an offsite facility. I have a bot that at regular intervals during the day, issue sudo lsof -nP -iTCP -sTCP:ESTABLISHED and several other commands to the servers and reports back.

All of this may sound like a lot, but really once you get everything grooving, it’s jippity jippity. I do business with:

• Contabo
• Ethernet Services
• LuxVPS

One thing I’ve learned through the years is that one man’s dream VPS service, is another man’s nightmare VPS service. Making recommendations is kind of hit and miss for this reason.

Picked up the story a while back. See, it would not do me good to have this happen to me. If I were forced to rename it, it would be the most deliberate, yet creative, slur against the other product.

+1 for Crowdsec

OP, here is what I do. It might seem overboard, and my way doesn’t make it the best, or the most right, but it seems to work for me:

• Fail2ban
• UFW
• Reverse Proxy
• IPtraf (monitor)
• Lynis (Audit)
• OpenVas (Audit)
• Nessus (Audit)
• Non standard SSH port
• CrowdSec + Appsec
• No root logins
• SSH keys
• Tailscale
• RKHunter

The auditing packages, like Lynis, will scour your server, and make suggestions as to how to further harden your server. Crowdsec is very handy in that it covers a lot of ‘stuff’. It’s not the only WAF around. There is Wazuh, Bunkerweb, etc. Lots of other great comments here with great suggestions. I tend to go overboard on security because I do not like mopping up the mess after a breach.

ETA: just looked up one of your attackers:

218.92.0.201 was found in our database! This IP was reported 64,044 times. Confidence of Abuse is 100%: ISP CHINANET jiangsu province network Usage Type Fixed Line ISP ASN AS4134 Domain Name chinatelecom.cn Country China City Shanghai, Shanghai

busy little cunts.

My two cents: Using a nonstandard ssh port is good for dumping bots. True, you can easily do a port scan against a server and easily find all open ports nbd. But most off-the-shelf bots are looking for standard ports to penetrate. I know that when I format and reinstall the test server, as soon as I change the ssh port, bot noise goes down significantly. So, for a simple config edit and about 2 minutes of time, it seems worth the effort. It’s just one layer tho. And yes, it goes without saying to pick a port other than 22, 222, 2222, etc.

Sometimes I’ll throw something on the test server just to see how it works and maybe gain a little knowledge along the way.

I saw that Docker Compose Maker in the wild. I could see how that would be very handy for those just getting started in the SelfHosting arena.

I’m not sure if this will help you out since I’m really not sure what your problems are other than getting the reverse proxy to work. So, I’ll give you what I’ve found to work and if it’s not what you were looking for then you can just skip over what I"m yammering on about.

The process:

Spin up a container, let’s say it’s Dozzle and it needs port 1124. Container deployed, so lets put it in reverse proxy:

Issue command together:

sudo nano /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
sudo systemctl restart caddy	

Enter the following in the Caddyfile:

dozzle.myverycooldomain.duckdns.org:443 {
	reverse_proxy localhost:1124
}

Press ctrl x, press y, press enter, and the Caddy server restarts if you indeed issued the commands together. Now go to dozzle.myverycooldomain.duckdns.org for test run.

I’ve seen it done as such:

sudo ufw deny out 1:19/tcp sudo ufw deny out 1:19/udp sudo ufw deny out 22:52/tcp sudo ufw deny out 22:52/udp sudo ufw deny out 54:79/tcp sudo ufw deny out 54:79/udp sudo ufw deny out 81:122/tcp sudo ufw deny out 81:122/udp sudo ufw deny out 124:442/tcp sudo ufw deny out 124:442/udp sudo ufw deny out 444:65535/tcp sudo ufw deny out 444:65535/udp

But your way seems a bit more elegant

My new strategy is to block EVERY port

Wow! All 65535 +/-, in and out? That’s one way to skin a cat.

• Fail2ban
• UFW
• Reverse Proxy
• IPtraf (monitor)
• Lynis (Audit)
• OpenVas (Audit)
• Nessus (Audit)
• Non standard SSH port
• CrowdSec + Appsec
• No root logins
• SSH keys
• Tailscale
• RKHunter

This is a very important point actually. A back up is worthless unless it has been tested.

It isn’t hard to do backups, just a chore

Right, and since now we have devices that can store thousands of pictures and data, and SSD cards that do the same, people tell themselves, maybe later, later, later until later catches up with you and you loose everything. It’s been at the end of last year, but my lady friend was riding my ztr and her phone fell out of her pocket. Next thing I saw was iphone bits blasting out from under the mower deck. Now luckily, I am very fastidious at backing up her phone, but shit happens and I’ve always been one who adhered to the 3-2-1 rule. In fact, on my daily driver computers, the only thing that is on their HDD is the OS, and maybe a app or two that I wanted to check out. They really are like thin clients. Otherwise, everything goes to storage and that is backed up daily.

Love tailscale. The only issue I had with it is making it play nice with my local, daily driver VPN. Got it worked out tho. So, now everything is jippity jippity.

In a life before a TBI and subsequent seizure condition robbed me of a functioning brain, I actually ran the IT dept for a company which I worked for as a mech eng, estimator, designer, and project manager. This one gentleman who was a field super and his wife had been trying for years to have a child. They finally did after many miscarriages and rough times, and as you can imagine, they took so many pictures of their baby. He called me one day in a panic about his computer and so I rushed over to his house. Long story short, his HDD had suffered a major crash for whatever reason, and everything was gone. No backups of his baby pictures, nothing. I sent the HDD off to see what could be recovered, but apparently it everything was toast.

Even tho it wasn’t my pictures, it hurt me to my core, that all these pictures and memories this man and his wife had accumulated, were gone forever. It really did a number on me and I think about it from time to time even tho that has been decades ago.

Make backups folks. It might take you the better part of a Saturday afternoon to get everything backed up and secure, but do it anyways.

Excuse me while I solve a few more captchas.

Buster for captcha.

Will Proxmox BackUp server handle remote VPS? I had assumed that it only was for ProxMox VM’s.

Backup Types: Proxmox Backup Server is optimized for backing up Proxmox VMs and containers. If your VPS is running a different virtualization platform, you may need to adapt your backup strategy accordingly.

That’s what AI tells me and then gives a configuration such as:

#!/bin/bash

# Variables
CONTAINER_NAME="your_container_name"
VOLUME_NAME="your_volume_name"
BACKUP_DIR="/path/to/backup/dir"
TIMESTAMP=$(date +"%Y%m%d_%H%M%S")

# Create a backup of the Docker volume
docker run --rm -v ${VOLUME_NAME}:/volume -v ${BACKUP_DIR}:/backup alpine \
    sh -c "cd /volume && tar czf /backup/${VOLUME_NAME}_${TIMESTAMP}.tar.gz ."

# Optionally, export the container
docker export ${CONTAINER_NAME} -o ${BACKUP_DIR}/${CONTAINER_NAME}_${TIMESTAMP}.tar

echo "Backup completed for ${CONTAINER_NAME} and ${VOLUME_NAME} at ${TIMESTAMP}"

Yeah I know it’s AI, which may or may not be completely accurate. Would I need to do that for each and every Docker container? I’ve got some 60 +/- containers. LOL <whine boohoo!>

That along with the client on the remote VPS would take care of Docker containers, however, I would also like to back up configuration files, and data associated with UFW, F2B, etc. Pretty much a snapshot of each server.

These lowendbox hosts don’t include snapshots and frills and Contabo only lets you keep one snapshot active. I did find an N8N flow that automates the snapshot process for Contabo. I guess I could upgrade to better hosts, but one of the VPS is my skunk works server where I run and test everything before putting it into production…it’s like $25 per year. Contabo is decent, and LuxVPS gives me the most bang for buck including all the frills for $10 a month. So, that’s about as much fun money I got for the time being.

I looked at Borg, didn’t see a GUI, but Borgwarehouse look good. It’s on the list. Thanks

I run Proxmox on the local server. I didn’t know Veeam had a community edition. The 13 gb download just finished. It’s on the list. Thanks.