I have Pangolin set up as a reverse proxy in my VPS and Cloudflare as a DNS provider with its free tier.

I want to migrate out of Cloudflare for my setup, however I lack the requisite network knowledge to safely transition my VPS and domain to better alternatives and don’t know where to start its research from.

There are two features I intend my setup to have after the transition:

• DDoS protection: I was considering using Crowdsec as there is a guide to incorporate it into Pangolin, but I do not know if it will be sufficient or not. I saw a post earlier listing some alternative DDoS protection solutions, but I am wary of their limited free tier options compared to that of Cloudflare and I don’t wish to pay for them as my homelab is mostly going to be used by me and a handful of friends.

• Wildcard Certificate Generation: My domain provider has a poor DNS service and is not listed under LEGO’s supporter DNS providers for enabling wildcard certificate generation and the Cloudflare one does not seem to work for some reason. I don’t know of any other compatible DNS provider I could shift to unless it is provided within the other DDoS protection services as mentioned above.

Again, I don’t have much knowledge in this field but I’m willing to learn and make an informed decision. Please let me know any suitable alternatives for the above, the pros and cons for the migrations, or some guide on performing such transition from Cloudflare as you seem fit.

For user-readable files or media I store them under ~/docker/data, and for everything else I store them under ~/docker/stacks/[service] where ~/docker/stacks is maintained by Dockge.

Is there a better way to do this?

I tried to study a bit from beej.us and I appreciated the style of teaching, but ultimately thought it wasn’t for me as it didn’t go much into depth and focused more on creating C programs. Is there some source from where I can learn in a comprehensive yet easy to understand manner the fundamentals of computer networking, at least to the extent that is relevant for selfhosting?

There are a few Docker projects I haven’t been able to properly implement in my homelab, only because their images need to be user-compiled and Dockge doesn’t seem to have an option to include the entire repository required for the project compilation in its interface or in the stacks directory. I know I could just host them in a separate directory but I would like my services to be manageable from a single place and following this approach isolates the service from being controlled from Dockge.

Is there some workaround or a solution for this I am unaware of? I initially thought I could deploy Coolify within Dockge and store the applications under it but apparently Coolify is meant to work on its own and I fear running both Coolify and Dockge will break stuff.

Reading earlier comments in this community made me consider documenting the workings of my homelab to some extent, ie. docker configuration, credentials, ports and links of my services. I’ve tried to make it consistent and organised but it still feels half baked and insufficient. Everyone suggests documenting everything you do in your homelab but don’t state how. Since I’ve hardly had experience running my own server, I would really appreciate observing the blueprint of some other fellow selfhoster for copying or taking inspiration from rather than considering documentation to be ‘left as an exercise for the reader’.

Edit: I already have a note-taking solution with me. What I wish to ask is to know what needs to be documented and what the structure of the documentation should be to accommodate the information.