If you’re behind a CG NAT (carrier grade NAT), you’ll be doubly in trouble as it will be essentially impossible to get a forwarded port since your “IP” is essentially a LAN address within your ISP’s CG NAT, if that makes sense.

I’m an idiot and never linked the link

https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/authentik-docker-compose-guide-2025/

1. I got started with a guide from these guys back in 2020. I still use traefik as my reverse proxy and Authelia for authentication and it has worked great all this time. As someone else said, everything is in containers on the one host and it is super easy this way. It all runs on a single box using containers for separation. I should probably look into a secondary server as a live backup, but that’s a lot of work / expense. I have a Cloudflare dynamic DNS container running for that.
2. I would definitely advocate for owning your own domain, for the added use case of owning your own email addresses. I can now switch email providers and don’t have to worry about losing anything. This would also lean towards a more memorable domain, or at least a second domain that is memorable. Stay away from the country TLDs or “cute” generic TLDs and stay with a tried and true .com or .net (which may take some searching).
3. I don’t bother with this, I just run my server behind Cloudflare, and let them protect my server. Some might disagree, but it’s easy for me and I like that.
4. Containers, containers, containers! Probably Docker since it’s easy, but Podman if you really want to get fancy / extra secure. Also, make sure you have a git repo for your compose files, and a solid backup strategy from the start (so much easier than going back and doing it later). I use Backblaze for my backups and it’s $2/month for some peace of mind.
5. Do it!!!

It doesn’t help our friends in the EU, but I’m hopeful that the CFPB’s “Open Banking” rules might actually make it possible to do this with an open source product with OAuth and common APIs rather than these aggregators that are just web scraping your bank.

I’ve heard others recommend Low End Box before but I have no experience, so do some due diligence before selecting any of these!

https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/

Absolutely no shot I can afford 40 TB of SSDs for my NAS

You don’t need portainer for it to be easy! The wiki is quite great at providing setup examples for docker compose, regular docker, and others!

I figure if I’m already using their proxy, may as well have my domains there as well… one fewer party to trust.

Not something that I need but absolutely beautiful UI and congrats on the 2.0 release!

Yeah tbh if I’m already going to be using Cloudflare for DNS, might as well use them for their registrar as well. One fewer entity to trust.

They own the domain instead of you. They can then act as a middle man between any inquiries and you, and as a company, they’re able to shield you from many 3rd parties.

Definitely a fair point, always good to see that in a project

Although in the subscription version, SSO is not available unless you purchase the “Contact Us” version. https://sso.tax would like a word.

Yep, I use Fastmail and it has this well integrated within the service as “Masked Emails”

I use Fastmail.

My domain has me plus the wife, and she’s not willing to tolerate any amount of fiddling or bugs or anything, so we needed something that would Just Work™, and Fastmail fits the bill quite well.

Their features are great, I actually prefer their app over the native iOS app, and they’ve been rock solid since I signed up. I can also have any amount of aliased and I can put all three of my domains on there. Plus they’re not Google which was the biggest thing I needed them to be.

Love / hate how it’s always the easiest answer. For me it’s always fucking DNS.

If you do you can have your domain taken away if they care enough to investigate. Agreed on the no privacy, it’s annoying.

I started out by setting up a Pi-Hole for my house and learning and failing small to get my head around how Linux worked and how to actually use a command line / SSH / the works.

From there I went to the website https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/ (specifically this guide) which was extremely helpful in understanding the basics of services, networking, DNS, etc. I’d say that if you’re able to get a full setup going with Traefik on Docker, that’s a really good setup for success for self hosting just about anything that can be Dockerized (which is basically anything).

Now I’m able to just read the documentation for a service at hub.docker.com, figure out how I want to customize it for my specific setup (e.g. putting gluetun in front of specific containers, setting up cron jobs to automate some container tasks, and creating a suitable backup) all with my knowledge of how this stuff works which I gained through lots of trial and error with the above guide.

That’s really all there is to it: just diving in, making mistakes, and learning from them until you start to build your knowledge of how stuff works and are comfortable going above and beyond copy and paste.

Awesome, thanks so much for the help!

Can you help me to understand how to bypass the CDN while using Plex?