Absolutely! To be honest, I don’t even want to have countless machines under my umbrella, and constantly have consodilation in mind - but right now, each machine fulfills a separate purpose and feels justified in itself (homelab for large data, main VPS for anything thats operation critical and cant afford power/network outages and so on). So unless I find another purpose that none of the current machines can serve, I’ll probably scale vertically instead of horizontally (is that even how you use that expression?)

In addition to the other commenter and their great points, here’s some more things I like:

• ressource efficient: im running all my stuff on low end servers, and cant afford my reverse proxy to waste gigabytes of RAM (kooking at you, NPM)
• very easy syntax: the Caddyfile uses a very simple, easy to remember syntax. And the documentation is very precise and quickly tells me what to do to achieve something. I tried traefik and couldn’t handle the long, complicated tag names required to set anything up.
• plugin ecosystem: caddy is written in go, and very easy to extend. There’s tons of plugins for different functionalities, that are (mostly) well documented and easy to use. Building a custom caddy executable takes one command.

Thank you! It’s done in excalidraw.com. Not the most straightforward for flowcharts, took me some time to figure out the best way to sort it all. But very powerful once you get into the flow.

If you’re feeling funny, you can download the original image from the catbox link and plug it right back into the site like a save file!

If you’re referring to the “LabProxy VPS”: So that I don’t have to point a public domain that I (plan to) use more and more in online spaces to my personal IP address, allowing anyone and everyone to pinpoint my location. Also, I really don’t want to mess with the intricacies of DynDNS. This solution is safer and more reliable than DynDNS and open ports on my router thats not at all equipped to fend off cyberspace attacks.

If you’re referring to the caddy reverse proxy on the LabProxy VPS: I’m pointing domains that I want to funnel into my homelab at the external IP of the proxy VPS. The caddy server on that VPS reads these requests and reverse-proxies them onto the caddy-port from the homelab, using the hostname of my homelab inside my tailscale network. That’s how I make use of the tunnel. This also allows me to send the crowdsec ban decisions from the homelab to the Proxy VPS, which then denies all incoming requests from that source IP before they ever hit my homelab. Clean and Safe!

Change the ssh port to something with 4-5 digits, disable ssh password Auth and use certificates only, don’t expose any port other than ssh and 443.

If you’re paranoid, use cloudflare as a proxy and set the VPS firewall to only accept incoming traffic from cloudflares ip list.

That’s about it really.