is it worth hosting my website on my old phone? Im still learning web dev and I wanna know if I can avoid paying for hosting and I think it’ll be safer
If it is an android device you probably could.
Although, couldn’t you just host it in a container on your PC?
It depends what you are hosting. If you are hosting something like a website, it is much safer to host it outside your network. If the webserver on your phone gets compromised, you could expose your entire network from the inside.
On the other hand, if the purpose of the site is to hold a bunch of sensitive, personal data it may be safer to host it yourself.
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Although, couldn’t you just host it in a container on your PC?
I forgot that a point for a server on a phone is that i can keep it up for longer (if not always) and it wont consume as much power which is pretty hard to achieve on pc
but your point about safety is pretty solid
Running a lithium battery powered device constantly hooked up to mains power for extremely extended periods of time (months-years) the way you’d have to operate it to be much use as a host is a very good way to randomly start yourself a nice battery fire.
I personally wouldn’t do it for anything that needed to be around for a long time.
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I’d personally be paying attention to @z580c’s fire hazard warning.
This is true.
It is possible to segment and isolate parts of your home network, so a compromise in one area, does not immediately compromise another. This can be achieved in a number of ways, but limited by what your network hardware supports.
A firewall/router managing multiple physically isolated subnets is one example. VLAN’s is another method that achieves a similar thing in principal, with simpler hardware.
It’s a bit off topic, but the amount of “connected devices” within homes these days, that are connected to the home network, but the user has little to no awareness of what services that device has opened up to the world, should be concerning. Washing machines, fridges, hot water heaters, solar panels, LED lights, central heating, power monitoring, sound bars, TV’s, bedside radios… the list goes on. If one chooses to have these devices, I think it’d be prudent to keep them as isolated as is feasible. Each of these has the potential to introduce vulnerabilities.
That is true but it takes both the right equipment and the knowledge to do that. It isn’t the kind of thing you should be doing without deeply understanding what you are doing or you can create a false sense of security. Too many people create ways to compromise their vlans without realizing it so you need the expertise to do it right and keep up with the management of it.
I think, in general, it is better to keep external traffic outside of your own network whenever possible. Many companies that once hosted things internally no longer do so for that exact reason.
Agreed. I do my best to keep those devices off the network and do without the smart features but sometimes it isn’t possible. In those cases, I isolate the traffic.
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