I understand that people enter the world of self hosting for various reasons. I am trying to dip my toes in this ocean to try and get away from privacy-offending centralised services such as Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc.
As I spend more time here, I realise that it is practically impossible; especially for a newcomer, to setup any any usable self hosted web service without relying on these corporate behemoths.
I wanted to have my own little static website and alongside that run Immich, but I find that without Cloudflare, Google, and AWS, I run the risk of getting DDOSed or hacked. Also, since the physical server will be hosted at my home (to avoid AWS), there is a serious risk of infecting all devices at home as well (currently reading about VLANS to avoid this).
Am I correct in thinking that avoiding these corporations is impossible (and make peace with this situation), or are there ways to circumvent these giants and still have a good experience self hosting and using web services, even as a newcomer (all without draining my pockets too much)?
Edit: I was working on a lot of misconceptions and still have a lot of learn. Thank you all for your answers.
Then use Wireguard to get into your local network. Simple as. All security risks that don’t need to be accessed by the public (document servers, ssh, internal tools, etc…) can be accessed via VPN while the port forwarded servers are behind a reverse proxy, TLS, and an authentication layer like Authelia/authentik for things that only a small group needs to access.
Sorry, but there is 1 case in 10000 where a home user would have to have publicly exposed SSH and 9999 cases of 10000 where it is not needed at all and would only be done out of laziness or lack of knowledge of options.