so once you have a web server on the phone how are you able to make it available publicly on the internet? don't ISPs detect these and ban? are you using wireguard or something like that?
ive been looking to build and serve my own servers and i have been considering to use old android phones to outright racks but the part I am still struggling to figure out is how to serve it publicly without ISP catching on as they require business plans for that and its not cheap
1bpp•48m ago
A Wireguard tunnel via a free tier or dirt cheap VPS, or a VPN provider that lets you forward ports like Proton
agentifysh•44m ago
but can't the ISP still see something is up if there is traffic 24/7
srean•38m ago
Don't ISP's just charge per caps on ingress and egress volume?
From your comments it is clear that they don't. Super infuriating. Why should they care what I do with ingress and outgress that I paid for, as long as I am not hurting them.
Nextgrid•16m ago
His comments are based on fear-mongering he read somewhere or an overly-literal interpretation of terms and conditions written to cover the ISP's ass in every theoretical situation possible.
ISPs who enforce data caps already priced it in and technically have an incentive for you to exceed your cap as fast as possible so you pay to increase said cap (they can however still slow down your traffic as they wish, to ensure sufficient capacity for everyone).
ISPs who don't enforce a cap actually still internally enforce a reasonable cap of several terabytes at their discretion. And of course, they can and will use traffic shaping to ensure the integrity of their network so your usage doesn't affect others. If you exceed that soft cap consistently several months in a row they may get in touch, but other than that you're fine.
TLDR: host your server and enjoy. When you get to the scale of the next YouTube, then you have to worry.
lelandbatey•35m ago
Yes, though even though they can see that, as long as it's encrypted they can't know for sure, so as long as you don't cause problems they won't care at all that you're using it for something. In all my years I've never had an ISP complain about constant encrypted traffic, though some ISPs do have general data caps like Comcast.
Nextgrid•14m ago
Amount of traffic is what matters. Are you saturating your pipe 24/7 for an entire month? Sure, you may have problems. But you'd have the same problems if you were torrenting (let's assume legal torrents here, I am not talking about copyright) or hosting a mega LAN party with hundreds of people streaming their games all at once.
Although, you may also go with a 5$ virtual host (e.g. Linode Nanode 1 GB) and wireguard to build your own tunnel (or just the 5$ virtual host to run your server)
agentifysh•42m ago
i see so just run cf tunnel and ISP wouldn't be able to see I am hosting web apps? what if I am streaming large files (not torrent)? couldn't they see the bandwidths being consumed and then tell me to upgrade to business ?
eptcyka•40m ago
What kind of an ISP prohibits self-hosting?
flockonus•39m ago
Heavily depends on the contract with your ISP, I'm not aware of anything saying you can't use your uplink "commercially" - how one would even define and monitor that?
shevy-java•35m ago
It used to be easier to get a web server up and running in the past. I remember the 1990s fondly.
Not sure what changed, but things got more complex - and more expensive, too.
Nextgrid•34m ago
> don't ISPs detect these and ban
No. No ISP who desperately tries to grow marketshare at all costs and lock their customers into a year-long contract will intentionally ban users. I'm not even sure where this misconception comes from, it's not like ISPs led a massive PR campaign warning people of the dangers of running a server.
The only way you will get banned is if you cause disproportionate strain on their network, which means you'd need to exceed the usage of the typical gamer (downloading games worth hundreds of gigs regularly), streamer (streaming 4k video for hours at a time), cloud backup customer (uploading gigabytes regularly), Windows user (in its default configuration Windows can use P2P to share updates), torrenter (sustained full-duplex bandwidth usage), and unlucky idiot with a compromised device spewing DoS traffic at line-rate.
Saturate the pipe consistently for several days by hosting video? Yeah sure you could get a warning and eventually disconnected, assuming they don't already have traffic shaping solutions in place to just silently throttle you to an acceptable level and leave it up to you to move your homebrew YouTube clone elsewhere when you realize it's too slow.
Hosting a website which will have a few mbps worth of traffic with the occasional spike? That's a rounding error compared to your normal legitimate usage, so totally fine.
The reason most consumer ISPs have a clause against running servers (not even defining what counts as a server) is to preempt a potential business starting a data center off a collection of consumer connections and then bitching about it or demanding compensation when it goes down or they get cut off. Nobody cares about a technical user playing around and hosting a blog at home.
lelandbatey•19m ago
ISPs don't care, actually. They care about operational problems, but you serving a constant stream of web traffic is probably not going to matter to them; web traffic for even a pretty successful blog is going to be a tiny volume compared to you streaming 4k movies from Netflix.
ISPs will have rules (maximum data volume per month) and restrictions (ISP equipment auto-drops all sending/receiving packets on port 25, 80, 443, or 456), but within those limits the ISPs do not care as long as you cause no problems for them.
Also, one of the easiest ways to expose e.g. port 80 of your in-house server is to just have your local server do an SSH port-forward to a remote server like a cheap VPS. Note that by default it'll bind to a localhost port on the remote, so on the remote you'd need to have an HTTP server reverse proxying to the remote localhost:8080, or you need to enable `GatewayPorts: yes` in sshd on the remote. Assuming you turn on GatewayPorts on remote.example.com, here's how you could expose port 80 of localhost:
# Run this on in-your-house-computer to allow folks on public internet to visit
# remote.example.com:80 but have the traffic served by in-your-house-computer:80
ssh -R :80:localhost:80 username@remote.example.com
You can make the above connection permanent by setting up `autossh` on in-your-house-computer.
edbaskerville•12m ago
Other folks have given general answers, but I'm wondering, what ISP do you have, and where?
(I'm lucky to have Sonic, in the SF Bay Area. A local ISP that actively campaigned for net neutrality and has 1Gps symmetric as the standard basic fiber plan. Pretty sure they're not shutting down anybody's servers.)
prmoustache•11m ago
Why would your ISP ban you?
clueless•39m ago
Title should be updated to include "unused android phone"
mceachen•20m ago
"unused android phone with unlocked bootloader that is supported by postmarkOS"
(or maybe be able to use recovery zip that requires effort after every reboot)
shevy-java•36m ago
Nothing beats my toaster serving my webpages.
dinkleberg•31m ago
This sounds like a fun project. A perfect use for an old android phone sitting in the junk drawer.
_whiteCaps_•9m ago
For some reason, I never buy phones that work with postmarketOS :( And I find phone naming confusing, it's difficult to find a used one locally to play with. Is it a Moto Play 2018 or a Play 2020? Trying to get that information from someone on Facebook marketplace is like pulling teeth.
officeplant•7m ago
All my old phones used to become BOINC nodes doing WorldCommunityGrid or seti@home, at least until we got to the point where you couldn't run the phone without a battery anymore. Came home to one too many spicy pillow'd phones even keeping them in a cool area with a rigged up fan blowing on them.
agentifysh•55m ago
ive been looking to build and serve my own servers and i have been considering to use old android phones to outright racks but the part I am still struggling to figure out is how to serve it publicly without ISP catching on as they require business plans for that and its not cheap
1bpp•48m ago
agentifysh•44m ago
srean•38m ago
From your comments it is clear that they don't. Super infuriating. Why should they care what I do with ingress and outgress that I paid for, as long as I am not hurting them.
Nextgrid•16m ago
ISPs who enforce data caps already priced it in and technically have an incentive for you to exceed your cap as fast as possible so you pay to increase said cap (they can however still slow down your traffic as they wish, to ensure sufficient capacity for everyone).
ISPs who don't enforce a cap actually still internally enforce a reasonable cap of several terabytes at their discretion. And of course, they can and will use traffic shaping to ensure the integrity of their network so your usage doesn't affect others. If you exceed that soft cap consistently several months in a row they may get in touch, but other than that you're fine.
TLDR: host your server and enjoy. When you get to the scale of the next YouTube, then you have to worry.
lelandbatey•35m ago
Nextgrid•14m ago
Otherwise, no worries.
rlupi•46m ago
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...
Although, you may also go with a 5$ virtual host (e.g. Linode Nanode 1 GB) and wireguard to build your own tunnel (or just the 5$ virtual host to run your server)
agentifysh•42m ago
eptcyka•40m ago
flockonus•39m ago
shevy-java•35m ago
Not sure what changed, but things got more complex - and more expensive, too.
Nextgrid•34m ago
No. No ISP who desperately tries to grow marketshare at all costs and lock their customers into a year-long contract will intentionally ban users. I'm not even sure where this misconception comes from, it's not like ISPs led a massive PR campaign warning people of the dangers of running a server.
The only way you will get banned is if you cause disproportionate strain on their network, which means you'd need to exceed the usage of the typical gamer (downloading games worth hundreds of gigs regularly), streamer (streaming 4k video for hours at a time), cloud backup customer (uploading gigabytes regularly), Windows user (in its default configuration Windows can use P2P to share updates), torrenter (sustained full-duplex bandwidth usage), and unlucky idiot with a compromised device spewing DoS traffic at line-rate.
Saturate the pipe consistently for several days by hosting video? Yeah sure you could get a warning and eventually disconnected, assuming they don't already have traffic shaping solutions in place to just silently throttle you to an acceptable level and leave it up to you to move your homebrew YouTube clone elsewhere when you realize it's too slow.
Hosting a website which will have a few mbps worth of traffic with the occasional spike? That's a rounding error compared to your normal legitimate usage, so totally fine.
The reason most consumer ISPs have a clause against running servers (not even defining what counts as a server) is to preempt a potential business starting a data center off a collection of consumer connections and then bitching about it or demanding compensation when it goes down or they get cut off. Nobody cares about a technical user playing around and hosting a blog at home.
lelandbatey•19m ago
ISPs will have rules (maximum data volume per month) and restrictions (ISP equipment auto-drops all sending/receiving packets on port 25, 80, 443, or 456), but within those limits the ISPs do not care as long as you cause no problems for them.
Also, one of the easiest ways to expose e.g. port 80 of your in-house server is to just have your local server do an SSH port-forward to a remote server like a cheap VPS. Note that by default it'll bind to a localhost port on the remote, so on the remote you'd need to have an HTTP server reverse proxying to the remote localhost:8080, or you need to enable `GatewayPorts: yes` in sshd on the remote. Assuming you turn on GatewayPorts on remote.example.com, here's how you could expose port 80 of localhost:
You can make the above connection permanent by setting up `autossh` on in-your-house-computer.edbaskerville•12m ago
(I'm lucky to have Sonic, in the SF Bay Area. A local ISP that actively campaigned for net neutrality and has 1Gps symmetric as the standard basic fiber plan. Pretty sure they're not shutting down anybody's servers.)
prmoustache•11m ago