I understand that people enter the world of self hosting for various reasons. I am trying to dip my toes in this ocean to try and get away from privacy-offending centralised services such as Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc.
As I spend more time here, I realise that it is practically impossible; especially for a newcomer, to setup any any usable self hosted web service without relying on these corporate behemoths.
I wanted to have my own little static website and alongside that run Immich, but I find that without Cloudflare, Google, and AWS, I run the risk of getting DDOSed or hacked. Also, since the physical server will be hosted at my home (to avoid AWS), there is a serious risk of infecting all devices at home as well (currently reading about VLANS to avoid this).
Am I correct in thinking that avoiding these corporations is impossible (and make peace with this situation), or are there ways to circumvent these giants and still have a good experience self hosting and using web services, even as a newcomer (all without draining my pockets too much)?
Edit: I was working on a lot of misconceptions and still have a lot of learn. Thank you all for your answers.
It’s very possible. If you carefully manage your attack surface and update your software regularly, you can mitigate your security risks quite a bit.
The main problem is going to be email. I have found no reliable way to send email that does not start with “have someone else do it for you” or “obtain an IP block delegation”.
email isn’t that hard when you have a static IP, either from your network provider or via a VPS. Then, setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC and you’re good to go (at least for simple use cases like notifications. When you want to send out thousands of emails, you might need more.)