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Routing external server traffic to my own home server

  Hi everyone, I want to set my own home server for a small website-gallery to put some photos on, I know this is not ideal to do on a residence network and at home because it simply is not cost effective, but I'm entering university this year into computer engineering and I really want to start setting up servers and learning this kind of stuff.

  However, there is a small problem to which I gave up looking online, this being that my ISP TOS doesn't allow any kind of self hosted website or service, this being public or private, on their network, this would be no problem if I wanted to host a small website with not a lot of content on a VPS, but I want to set up my website as a gallery showcase of photographs I take and the people who visit the website to download any picture(s) they want as RAW or PNG, this means that I would need a lot of storage if I want to upload all my pictures, since this is a project just for fun and non-profit, having a VPS with huge storage capacity is out of sight. What I was thinking about is setting up a home server with Debian 10 and a 2TB drive, then setting up a front end website on a cheap VPS (debian) and then when a user requests to view or download any image, the request gets send to my home server and then the home server sends back the data to the VPS and then the VPS sends the data to the user. 

 

 I was thinking of setting a VPN between my home server and the VPS so that my ISP don't see that I'm doing something that breaks their TOS, but I'm not really sure on how to do it, I've looked at some stuff online but nothing specific that would help me with my end goal.

 

 Any information sources or leads are greatly appreciated! Also, I plan on licensing all my photos as CC0 and making the website code open source under GLPv3 

Edited by Light034

I use arch btw:)

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oops, accidentally uploaded my post before finishing writing... 

I use arch btw:)

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For a small site, your ISP won't care, id try hosting it anyways.

 

You can do the vpn to a vps too, but Id just host the small site from home, they won't care if its not much traffic.

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10 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

For a small site, your ISP won't care, id try hosting it anyways.

 

You can do the vpn to a vps too, but Id just host the small site from home, they won't care if its not much traffic.

I found it varies by ISP.  Years ago I had an ISP bust me for running an AnalogX SImple Server just to host images for some forums and such.

Meanwhile right now I have a full FTP, and bunch of web interface controls all running in UnRAID dockers and my current ISP cares not.  I wonder if it's just because none of them are on Port 80...

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14 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

For a small site, your ISP won't care, id try hosting it anyways.

 

You can do the vpn to a vps too, but Id just host the small site from home, they won't care if its not much traffic.

My ISP doesn't provide any static IP addresses and from what I found, I would need to set up a Dynamic DNS or something similar, but I'm not sure how complicated that would be, my router seems to support DDNS but I would need to look a little more into it

 

 

I use arch btw:)

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16 minutes ago, Light034 said:

My ISP doesn't provide any static IP addresses and from what I found, I would need to set up a Dynamic DNS or something similar, but I'm not sure how complicated that would be, my router seems to support DDNS but I would need to look a little more into it

 

 

Many home isps aren't static(like mine hasn't change in 6+ years), but dont' change often. And ddns is pretty easy to setup.

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10 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Many home isps aren't static(like mine hasn't change in 6+ years), but dont' change often. And ddns is pretty easy to setup.

Yeah, mine haven't changed in a long time.

 

Depending on what DDNS you use it should just be install it, enter some details in a config file and then let it run.

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. 
It matters that you don't just give up.”

-Stephen Hawking

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