This document outlines the infrastructure I use to host and manage my personal projects. Everything is self-maintained, secure, and built for reliability... on a high school budget.
My server is self-hosted and runs in my bedroom. To keep things stable, I use two UPS units to protect against power interruptions and maintain decent uptime, one on the server iself, and another powering my router and switching.
All external traffic goes through Cloudflare Tunnels, so no ports are directly exposed to the internet. SSH access is handled thru Cloudflare Zero Trust with certificate-based authentication.
I’ve also configured heavy DDoS protection through Cloudflare, since all traffic to my local network passes through it, it's essentially a remote firewall protecting my home network.
For redundancy and uptime, I use a dual-WAN router, along with a Firewalla Purple as an extra local firewall and network monitor.
- Operating System: Proxmox with 3 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS VPS's
- Primary Role: Backend hosting for my projects
- Frontends: Hosted on Cloudflare Pages for global low-latency access
Sensitive projects are also protected behind zero trust, making them completely unreachable without authentication. This setup lets me use one login for both project access and SSH authentication.
I use Datadog to monitor server and service uptime in real time. If any project or the entire server goes down, I get instant notifications on my phone and email.
Keeping this setup running has taught me a lot about networking, infrastructure security, and reliability, all while keeping full control of my environment, and not spending a single penny in monthly server costs. While for any actual important projects I would definitly go with AWS or another cloud provider, since none of my projects are large scale, or need high uptime, I can manage with a self hosted solution!
