Hi there, I've been reading up on selfhosting for a couple of weeks now and I got my feet wet with a couple of things.

However, before really getting serious with it, I feel I need to get down the basics and make sure that my server will not end up a security hazard. My final goal would be to self-host my socials (Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix) - just for myself.

What basic security do I need to have in place, considering these services? I'll be running this on a VPS and so far I consider the following: disable password login (login with ssh key only) then set up nginx, fail2ban, and a basic firewall. I'd try to close all ports that are not required for the services I run. I'll also change ssh port from 22 to something else and close port 22 as well.

Would this be a sufficient basis, or am I missing something crucial?

Bonus question: do you know of good tutorials to learn the above stuff? I've been following the guides on DigitalOcean (e.g. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-protect-an-nginx-server-with-fail2ban-on-ubuntu-20-04) and they seem decent enough - but I think I'll need to get into more depth than that :)

Hi, I'm trying to figure out how to set up a service like pi-hole and one of the prerequisits seems to be to have admin access to the router to make the correct DNS entries.

Unfortunately, the router provided by my ISP doesn't grant me access to these settings - is there a way around that, and what would it involve? I do have a hybdrid router (DSL + LTE connection), that's (according to my ISP) the reason DNS settings are locked.

Any ideas are welcome :)