How This Website Is Hosted

This page describes the architecture of the self hosted web platform used to run the website oe6vag.net. The system is designed to be lightweight, secure, and maintainable while running on a home server with a dynamic internet connection.

The overall concept, system architecture, setup procedure, and the following documentation were generated by ChatGPT.

Hardware and Network

- Physical server (Intel N100 Mini PC) running Ubuntu Server.
- Internet connection via A1 DSL (VDSL2).
- Router performs NAT and port forwarding.
- Local static IP for the server.
- Public IP assigned dynamically by ISP.

Operating System

- Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS
- Remote management via SSH
- System firewall using UFW
- Intrusion prevention with Fail2ban

Container Platform

- Docker is used as the container runtime.
- Services are deployed as isolated containers.
- Container management through Portainer web interface.

Web Stack

Main components:
- Ghost CMS (content management system)
- MySQL database backend
- Caddy reverse proxy
Caddy automatically provides:
- HTTPS via Let's Encrypt
- Reverse proxy for Ghost
- Automatic certificate renewal

Daily Backup

To ensure data integrity and protection against hardware failure or software issues, the website is backed up automatically once per day.

The backup process includes:

• Ghost content (images, themes, configuration)
• The MySQL database containing all posts and pages

Backups are stored on a separate NAS (Network Attached Storage) within the local network. This ensures that a failure of the web server itself does not affect the stored backups. The backup procedure runs automatically via a scheduled job allowing the website to be restored if required.

Why Self Hosting?

- No tracking scripts
- No ads
- Lightweight infrastructure
- Educational project