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?
VPN is probably the easiest since you can use tools you’re probably already familiar with, like RDP. But Guacamole is a pretty slick web interface for remote desktop to internal servers.
As far as encrypting jellyfin traffic, I’m not familiar with the specific details, but I imagine it has something similar to Plex where you check a box to require encrypted connections. With that enabled, the ISP can see that you’re sending traffic over port X to IP Y, and how much traffic you’re sending, but they can’t see what the traffic is.
This is true, but if they see lots of traffic to port 8096, they will be able to deduce that you’re running a emby or jellyfin server, just not what content you’re hosting on it.
If you want to prevent them from knowing that, you should look into housing your own vpn like wireguard or openvpn (both open source).