Self-Hosting like it's 2025

I love the idea of self-hosting, especially since I keep a number of very tiny websites/projects going at any given time, so resources would not really be too much of an issue for me.

What stops me is security. I simply do not know enough about securing a self-hosted site on real hardware in my home and despite actively continuing to learn, it seems like the more I learn about it, the more questions I have. My identity is fairly public at this point, so if I say the wrong thing to the wrong person on HN or whatever, do I need to worry about someone much smarter than me setting up camp on my home network and ruining my life? That may sound really stupid to many of you, but this is the type of anxiety that stops the under-informed from trying stuff like this and turning to services like Akamai/Linode or DO that make things fairly painless in terms of setup, monitoring and protection.

That said, I'm 110% open to reading/watching any resources people have that help teach newbies how to protect their assets when self-hosting.

A few days after a remark on hn, while the thread was still active, I received a mysterious package I didn't order from a weird drop shipping service where the original sender is unknown and undiscoverable to you the recipient. It didn't contain anything bad just a single surgical mask (during covid, common valueless item basically). The message was just that they could find my home address. It was a stupid message since I obviously do not hide my identity on hn. But it means you're not wrong to be careful, both in general, and on hn in particular.

Hmm, my first guess would have been that you have been a target of "brushing" [1]. In a Reddit thread from 2020 [2], multiple people mention that they received surgical masks they did not order.

[1] https://www.bbb.org/article/news-releases/20509-amazon-brush... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/tulsa/comments/hpe8s1/just_got_a_su...