How to Host a Website from Home Without Exposing Your IP

The problem with self-hosting at home

Running a website from a spare PC at home is the cheapest hosting there is — but it comes with a real trade. To make the site reachable you either port-forward on your router (opening your home network to the internet) or use a tunnel service that rewrites requests through their edge. Either way, your home IP ends up discoverable, and every scanner on the internet can knock on your router's door.

One mistake — an exposed service, a default password, a forgotten management port — turns your hobby site into a way into your home network.

The container-and-tunnel model

Tiny-Puter inverts the setup. Your website runs in a Linux container that has no public IP. It lives on a private network inside our infrastructure, and all traffic reaches it through our gateway — which is the only thing the internet can see.

When you want to publish a site, you point it at a Cloudflare tunnel and get a public hostname. Visitors reach the site through Cloudflare and our gateway; the container itself stays invisible, and your home network is never in the path at all. You can run services, experiment, and even break things — without ever exposing your home IP.

• Your container has no public address — nothing to scan
• Publish through a Cloudflare tunnel: public hostname, private origin
• Your home IP and router are never exposed anywhere
• 100 Mbps unmetered — enough for real traffic, no bandwidth bill

What you can run

Anything that fits in 256–512 MB of RAM and runs on Debian or Alpine: a small web server, a blog, a portfolio, an API you're learning to build. The publish guide in the dashboard walks through the tunnel setup step by step, including installing podman and running a hello-world server on port 3000.