I finally bought a domain! Now what

2026-07-02 03:45 UTC

Hi everyone Thanks for all the advice on buying a domain. Its a big week for me. Getting on grapheneos, buying a domain, and I also recently started self hosting my contacts and calendar. I love this way of life. My original plan was to one of the xyz 1.1111b domains for $1 a year but most of the feedback I got said just go with cloudflare. Its a lot more money than I had planned but all the security features are baked in and I feel that’s worth the extra money. Here are my questions. I use the latest version of truenas community How do I connect my domain to my server apps? I’ve got a series of apps I’d love to he able to access without tailscale and solely use the domain. I have heard the term DNS a million times but don’t really understand it. What do.I need to know about DNS to keep security up and stay protected I’d like to let family access my media server, are there any considerations I need to make? How can I use one domain to access multiple services on my server? Do I need to pay extra for subdomains? Thank you for any advice

Replies (5)

@irmadlad@lemmy.world 2026-07-02 09:58

Now what Congratulations on the new domain name! Now what? Well, first you don’t tell anyone here what it is. /s Since you are already with Cloudflare, why not go all out and set up Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust? Once you install Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust on the server, you no longer need to do all that port fiddling, NAT fiddling, none of that. If you decide to go the Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust route, I have some set up notes you might find beneficial. I’d be more than happy to share them. It isn’t that setting up Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust is hard, but it was a bit touch and go for me, but I got there, and wrote that shit down. LOL @pmk@piefed.ca has some great advice about documentation. DO IT! Write everything down during deploy. After a successful deploy, distill your notes and clean them up. Make them a part of your 3,2,1 backup scheme.

Open ##3538817
@frongt@lemmy.zip 2026-07-02 03:57

I would strongly encourage continuing to use tailscale or another VPN. The more you expose to the Internet, the more opportunities you present to an attacker. If you family also uses the VPN client, they can access the systems in the same way. Plenty of learning material out there on DNS. But no, you don’t have to pay extra for subdomains. You can put the records up on cloudflare or host them internally. Generally it’s considered bad practice to put local records in public DNS, but it doesn’t actually matter that much. You can set up a reverse proxy to route traffic to each service based on the domain name used. Most people use caddy, some use traefik, and some use nginx proxy manager.

Open ##3688535
@valkyre09@lemmy.world 2026-07-02 04:22

Cloudflare tunnels is a great way to expose services on your network to the web. You run a program in your server, it makes a tunnel, then you configure it on the website to visit the internal link in your network, eg If you’re hosting a web server at home, you could have something like: www.mydomain.net > 192.168.1.55:8080 You can also have cloudflare protect access to that website with email verification, google / Microsoft accounts etc. It’s a lot to learn, but it’s very handy once you get the hang of it. Here’s a YouTube video on the basics: youtu.be/Q5dG8g4-Sx0?is=J7KvNZoyjsEq33fO

Open ##3690658
@Svinhufvud@sopuli.xyz 2026-07-02 05:18

I recommend you make A and AAAA records for the top level domain you own, and then set the needed subdomains as CNAME entries. example.com points to your IP addresses, and the subdomains point then to your top level name. This avoids you having to point a new IP at multiple places (be it manually or by dyndns) when//if your public IP changes. Then you can set up a reverse proxy (caddy for example, it comes with automatic TLS), bind ports 80 and 443 to it, and route the traffic based on the name a client is trying to connect with. So jellyfin.example.com would lead to your reverse proxy which would forward it somewhere internally, say 192.168.1.10:8096 for example. This avoids you having to specify ports when connecting externally.

Open ##3695898
@darklamer@feddit.org 2026-07-02 05:58

I have heard the term DNS a million times but don’t really understand it. Learn about DNS, it’s the glue that holds the internet together, any time you spend on learning more about DNS will quickly pay off. You probably already know that it’s what maps domain names to IP addresses and vice versa, but it can be used for loads of other useful things too. (My own two favourite not well known but totally standardized really convenient things to use DNS for is to provide SSH host keys through DNSSEC for hosts with dynamic IP addresses and requesting letsencrypt certificates for host names without any webserver.)

Open ##3699513