I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.
I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.
I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)
Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.
Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.
Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!
Networking is extremely dense and extremely hard.
Its also a space filled with professionals who do it for a job. Many on this sub are current or ex networking or security professionals who understand this shit like the back of their hand.
Im no idiot with IT - I’ve had pc’s my whole life and work in close proxiimity to IT. But networking, security and the clusterfuck of everything associated with it is honestly about as hard to get into as actuarial science.
It requires such a heavy base of fundamental concepts that if you dont start at the bottom and work up, you have no clue wtf is going on.