Way back when, my Dad always told me to have at least three copies of everything, because one backup is no backup. So I have a 1TB Storage Box at Hetzner (€4/month, in a different datacenter than my VPSes) I push backups to with Restic. I also backup to a local machine (also with restic), and to my Dad’s NAS (you guessed, with restic), and to my old Debian server until I decommission it (also with restic).

All legs have different retention settings, based on how much space I have at a particular backup site.

Check their docs, mostly.

If all your services support binding to a unix socket, I’d bind them to /run/<servicename>.sock or similar, and set up a reverse proxy that hits /run/$servicename.sock when serving $servicename.devicename.lan. If the service can’t bind to a unix socket, you can probably socat it or similar, and keep using the generic reverse proxy. Then, all your router has to do is route port 80 to your Debian machine.

I’m running Tang on a VPS, outside of my homelab. Servers in my homelab set up networking and a dedicated WireGuard tunnel to the VPS from initrd, to be able to talk to Tang, to help unlock the filesystem. The WireGuard tunnel is only allowed from my home ISP’s ASN. So if anyone picks up all my equipment from my homelab and walks away with them, they will not be able to boot them up, unless they connect from my ISP’s ASN (good luck), or know the passphrase.

Additionally, some of my homelab computers that support TPM also have a TPM pin, so walking away with the disk only, and connecting from my ISP’s ASN would still not be enough. This is rather pointless, anyone who walks away with the disk only will likely take the entire computer instead. But it was fun setting it up.

In the not so distant future, I’ll update this setup to use Shamir Secret Sharing more, where I’ll have three pins: my VPS (via Wireguard), a small computer somewhere else in my apartment, and a third at a neighbour (+ TPM on supporting computers).

I’m using a setup similar to what you had in mind: I have a small €4/month VPS as my front, with scrapers taken care of by iocaine (it both blocks them, and firewalls the worst off automatically). That’s over 90% of the HTTP(s) traffic never making it past the VPS, greatly reducing the traffic into my home network. My actual servers are behind a WireGuard tunnel.

It does not protect against a non-HTTP DDoS, but that wasn’t part of my threat model to begin with. My VPS provider (Hetzner) has DDoS protection even for €4/month servers - that doesn’t include the scraper DDoS, but includes other kinds - I have luckily not been a victim of any, so no idea whether it works reliably.

Against the scrapers, a VPS + bot defense + Wireguard works like a charm. Can recommend.

Depends on what kind of DDoS OP wants to defend against. Defending against an AI crawler DDoS is entirely possible with a tiny VPS. I’ve been doing that for the past ~1.5 years on a €4/month CX23 Hetzner VPS.

Scriptability has been a thing since 2.2.0, released on 2025-06-16, but the built-in script appeared in 3.0 (2025-11-14).

Around here. In the default configuration, it is using the built-in handler. The script can be replaced with something like Nam-Shub of Enki (used by pretty much everything I host, and by Codeberg too, for example).

I’m very late to the party, but: no, iocaine does not expect you to detect the bots. It used to, but it does its own detection for quite a while now (you can replace the detection mechanism, though).

I have a social life because of the internet. That’s where most of my friends are, too.