Tags:
Homelab
,
Self-Hosting
Published June 24, 2026, 2:03 p.m. by wielandtech
The normal way to put a self-hosted thing on the internet is to forward ports 80 and 443 from your home router to whatever's serving them. It works fine. I just didn't want it. Forwarding those ports puts my home IP address in public DNS where anyone can look it up, and it leaves a permanent hole in my router pointing straight at my cluster. Neither of those sat well with me.
So the public face of my homelab isn't my house at all. It's a $5 VPS that holds the public IP and tunnels back to me over WireGuard. My home router has zero inbound ports open. Not 443, not 80, nothing. This post is less about how I set that up and more about why, because the tradeoffs turned out to be the interesting part.
How …
Tags:
Homelab
,
Self-Hosting
Published March 24, 2026, 2:52 a.m. by wielandtech
I used to get a steady stream of fake accounts and spam through my sign-up and contact forms. Not a huge volume, but enough to be annoying and make me question my data.
So I added Invisible reCAPTCHA v3. Since then, I haven't had a single fake account.
Why reCAPTCHA v3?
It works differently than the old checkbox version. There's no "I'm not a robot" challenge.
Instead, it gives each request a score based on how human it looks. You decide what score is acceptable and block the rest. Real users never see anything.
How I Implemented It
1. Load the script
<script src="https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js?render=YOUR_SITE_KEY"></script>
2. Attach it to form submission
async function getRecaptchaToken(action) {
return …
