[agentifysh]

so once you have a web server on the phone how are you able to make it available publicly on the internet? don't ISPs detect these and ban? are you using wireguard or something like that?

ive been looking to build and serve my own servers and i have been considering to use old android phones to outright racks but the part I am still struggling to figure out is how to serve it publicly without ISP catching on as they require business plans for that and its not cheap

[lelandbatey]

ISPs don't care, actually. They care about operational problems, but you serving a constant stream of web traffic is probably not going to matter to them; web traffic for even a pretty successful blog is going to be a tiny volume compared to you streaming 4k movies from Netflix.

ISPs will have rules (maximum data volume per month) and restrictions (ISP equipment auto-drops all sending/receiving packets on port 25, 80, 443, or 456), but within those limits the ISPs do not care as long as you cause no problems for them.

Also, one of the easiest ways to expose e.g. port 80 of your in-house server is to just have your local server do an SSH port-forward to a remote server like a cheap VPS. Note that by default it'll bind to a localhost port on the remote, so on the remote you'd need to have an HTTP server reverse proxying to the remote localhost:8080, or you need to enable `GatewayPorts: yes` in sshd on the remote. Assuming you turn on GatewayPorts on remote.example.com, here's how you could expose port 80 of localhost:

    # Run this on in-your-house-computer to allow folks on public internet to visit
    # remote.example.com:80 but have the traffic served by in-your-house-computer:80
    ssh -R :80:localhost:80 [e-mail]

You can make the above connection permanent by setting up `autossh` on in-your-house-computer.

[hn_acc1]

If you're already paying someone monthly to "forward" ports, why not just pay for a blog somewhere? Way more secure.

[lelandbatey]

Cause the server in your house is a lot cheaper to upgrade with more RAM/storage than a VPS. By using a VPS as just a way to make traffic available, you can choose an extremely cheap VPS. It's pretty easy to find places that'll charge you $2 USD/month for a tiny VPS with 1TB monthly data transfer allowances; for $5 you can get unlimited data transfer. There's tons of good deals.

[euroderf]

Would this involve "the usual" dangers of someone hacking the in-your-house server ?

[lelandbatey]

Yes, with asterisks. If you're serving static files from your house, the risk of having your server taken over is incredibly low. If you're hosting Wordpress on your home server, that risk spikes massively. So make sure you understand what is and is not dangerous, and of course, only expose the "low risk parts" to the outside world.

[rlupi]

A CloudFlare tunnel?

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...

Although, you may also go with a 5$ virtual host (e.g. Linode Nanode 1 GB) and wireguard to build your own tunnel (or just the 5$ virtual host to run your server)

[Gabrys1]

at this point you don't need the phone :D

[agentifysh]

i see so just run cf tunnel and ISP wouldn't be able to see I am hosting web apps? what if I am streaming large files (not torrent)? couldn't they see the bandwidths being consumed and then tell me to upgrade to business ?

[eptcyka]

What kind of an ISP prohibits self-hosting?

[lelandbatey]

Yes, an ISP could see that you're using a lot of traffic. But if the traffic is encrypted, they can't be sure what you're doing. Are you a personal user? Or are you a business? How would they know if it's all encrypted?

As for the volume of traffic you're sending, you need to read the terms of your ISP contract, at least a little. Your ISP could have volume limits (e.g. only 5TB of traffic per month), and if you reach those limits, they could temporarily suspend service. But if they can't see what you're doing, and you're within the technical and contractual limits of your service agreement, and you're not causing problems for them, then an ISP is not going to care what you do.

[flockonus]

Heavily depends on the contract with your ISP, I'm not aware of anything saying you can't use your uplink "commercially" - how one would even define and monitor that?

[Nextgrid]

> don't ISPs detect these and ban

No. No ISP who desperately tries to grow marketshare at all costs and lock their customers into a year-long contract will intentionally ban users. I'm not even sure where this misconception comes from, it's not like ISPs led a massive PR campaign warning people of the dangers of running a server.

The only way you will get banned is if you cause disproportionate strain on their network, which means you'd need to exceed the usage of the typical gamer (downloading games worth hundreds of gigs regularly), streamer (streaming 4k video for hours at a time), cloud backup customer (uploading gigabytes regularly), Windows user (in its default configuration Windows can use P2P to share updates), torrenter (sustained full-duplex bandwidth usage), and unlucky idiot with a compromised device spewing DoS traffic at line-rate.

Saturate the pipe consistently for several days by hosting video? Yeah sure you could get a warning and eventually disconnected, assuming they don't already have traffic shaping solutions in place to just silently throttle you to an acceptable level and leave it up to you to move your homebrew YouTube clone elsewhere when you realize it's too slow.

Hosting a website which will have a few mbps worth of traffic with the occasional spike? That's a rounding error compared to your normal legitimate usage, so totally fine.

The reason most consumer ISPs have a clause against running servers (not even defining what counts as a server) is to preempt a potential business starting a data center off a collection of consumer connections and then bitching about it or demanding compensation when it goes down or they get cut off. Nobody cares about a technical user playing around and hosting a blog at home.

[whynotmaybe]

Many ISP don't care.

Some may block port 80 and 443 "For Security", but you can sometimes contact the support and they'll open it, even if you're not a business.

I have a webserver running at home and use the free dynamic dns from noip.com.

[shevy-java]

It used to be easier to get a web server up and running in the past. I remember the 1990s fondly.

Not sure what changed, but things got more complex - and more expensive, too.

[teo_zero]

> Not sure what changed

IP4 address exhaustion.

[edbaskerville]

Other folks have given general answers, but I'm wondering, what ISP do you have, and where?

(I'm lucky to have Sonic, in the SF Bay Area. A local ISP that actively campaigned for net neutrality and has 1Gps symmetric as the standard basic fiber plan. Pretty sure they're not shutting down anybody's servers.)

[louismerlin]

In my experience (in Germany and Switzerland) ISPs don’t care, but they will rotate everybody’s IP once or twice a year.

Friends from other countries, India for example, have had different experiences though, where IPs were on a much more frequent rotation and required scripted solutions.

[jeroenhd]

> don't ISPs detect these and ban

No? I mean, I'm sure there are ISPs out there that do it, but that's a ridiculous thing to do.

[1bpp]

A Wireguard tunnel via a free tier or dirt cheap VPS, or a VPN provider that lets you forward ports like Proton

[agentifysh]

but can't the ISP still see something is up if there is traffic 24/7

[Nextgrid]

Amount of traffic is what matters. Are you saturating your pipe 24/7 for an entire month? Sure, you may have problems. But you'd have the same problems if you were torrenting (let's assume legal torrents here, I am not talking about copyright) or hosting a mega LAN party with hundreds of people streaming their games all at once.

Otherwise, no worries.

[Marsymars]

Would use less bandwidth than wi-fi cameras that are uploading 24/7.

[lelandbatey]

Yes, though even though they can see that, as long as it's encrypted they can't know for sure, so as long as you don't cause problems they won't care at all that you're using it for something. In all my years I've never had an ISP complain about constant encrypted traffic, though some ISPs do have general data caps like Comcast.

[srean]

Don't ISP's just charge per caps on ingress and egress volume?

From your comments it is clear that they don't. Super infuriating. Why should they care what I do with ingress and outgress that I paid for, as long as I am not hurting them.

[Nextgrid]

His comments are based on fear-mongering he read somewhere or an overly-literal interpretation of terms and conditions written to cover the ISP's ass in every theoretical situation possible.

ISPs who enforce data caps already priced it in and technically have an incentive for you to exceed your cap as fast as possible so you pay to increase said cap (they can however still slow down your traffic as they wish, to ensure sufficient capacity for everyone).

ISPs who don't enforce a cap actually still internally enforce a reasonable cap of several terabytes at their discretion. And of course, they can and will use traffic shaping to ensure the integrity of their network so your usage doesn't affect others. If you exceed that soft cap consistently several months in a row they may get in touch, but other than that you're fine.

TLDR: host your server and enjoy. When you get to the scale of the next YouTube, then you have to worry.

[prmoustache]

Why would your ISP ban you?