The latter

We like the reddit-adjacent function in lemmy compared to a standard bbs.

Sorry I thought I had that included. We’re primarily in the US. Very rarely we see users from the UK though.

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My bad, corrected

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My understanding had been that I’d still be hosting it locally with a VPS but I’m probably misunderstanding that as this the first time I’m looking into this kind of thing. I’ll take a look at those VPS services you mentioned. Thank you.

Additionally, it was my understanding that using cloudflare and nginx proxy would protect me from DDOS. Am I misunderstanding that?

Looking at Hetzner, the max disk space they offer is 300gb. Is this enough for much activity? The usual activity in my sub is photo sharing, so I’m concerned over disk space availability.

Thanks a lot for your thoughtful reply! I greatly appreciate it

If I’m not mistaken to make your instance available to other people you’d have to set up a reverse proxy. And a correctly set up reverse proxy shouldn’t reveal your IP, only the local IP (127.0.0.1).

Thank you for this information, if this is correct it sounds like this isn’t something I need to worry about then.

Is there any documentation you could link me to that would go into greater detail about how I can do that?

Alright, thank you for your help!

Yeah, you’re definitely right about that. I would still like to prevent that from happening. I’d rather it shows the general area of a place nowhere near where I’m at.

Alternatively you can run your own VPN with a VPS (and use it like a reverse proxy), then you can easily control the port forwarding.

This latter part, please forgive me as this is the first time I’m looking into hosting a web service. My plan was to purchase a domain with Google, which would include WHOIS privacy. Is this what you’re referring to here?

Thanks a bunch for this! This actually does well enough to answer all of my questions in a way that will allow me to get started! Very much appreciated.