I’m happily serving a few websites and services publicly. Now I would like to host my Navidrome server, but keep the contents private on the web to stay out of trouble. I’m afraid that when I install a reverse proxy, it’ll take my other stuff online offline and causes me various headaches that I’m not really in the headspace for at the moment. Is there a safe way to go about doing this selectively?
Reverse proxies don’t keep anything private. That’s not what they are for. And if you do use them, you still have to do port forwarding (assuming the proxy is behind your router).
For most home hosting, a reverse proxy doesn’t offer any security improvement over just port forwarding directly to the server, assuming the server provides the access controls you want.
If you’re looking to access your services securely (in the sense that only you will even know they exist), then what you want is a VPN (for vpns, you also often have to port forward, though sometimes the forwarding/router firewall hole punching is setup automatically). If the service already provides authentication and you want to be able to easily share it with friends/family etc then a VPN is the wrong tool too (but in this case setting up HTTPS is a must, probably through something like letsencrypt)
Now, there’s a problem because companies have completely corrupted the normal meaning of a VPN with things like nordvpn that are actually more like proxies and less like VPNs. A self hosted VPN will allow you to connect to your hone network and all the services on it without having to expose those services to the internet.
In a way, VPNs often function in practice like reverse proxies. They both control traffic from the outside before it gets to things inside. But deeper than this they are quite different. A reverse proxy controls access to particular services. Usually http based and pretty much always TCP/IP or UDP/IP based. A VPN controls access to a network (hence the name virtual private network). When setup, it shows up on your clients like any other Ethernet cable or WiFi network you would plug in. You can then access other computers that are on the VPN, or given access to to the VPN though the VPN server.
The VPN softwares usually recommended for this kind of setup are wireguard/openvpn or tailscale/zerotier. The first two are more traditional VPN servers, while the second two are more distributed/“serverless” VPN tools.
I’m sorry if this is a lot of information/terminology. Feel free to ask more questions.
That is such a clear explanation and makes a lot of sense, thank you again.
Since the services I’m interested in serving are authenticated then it sounds like HTTPS is what I need (which is what originally made the most sense to me). That’s a relief. I just need to figure out how to have separate HTTP and HTTPS services hosted from the one ARM service.