Running website from home for one friend. Is it safe?

[h4rm0ny]

I have a fixed IP address and I want to provide a web-based service to a friend (JIRA and Confluence, basically) for their project. The alternatives for them are paying for Atlassian's Cloud based options ($20 per month) or running it on their little laptop. They're not very IT savvy and these products would involve them not only configuring the software but installing and managing the backend database and webserver as well. Not impossible, but a significant ask.

So as I have this software locally I thought about opening up a hole in my firewall and letting them connect to mine. I'm pretty sure I can do that but I'm not so certain about security of having the outside world able to peer into my home network. Any advice?

I've looked to see how cheaply I can get a server online that could run it but the prices are really high!

 

[h4rm0ny]

Look intp using cloudflare to proxy the site, then you can set it up without anyone knowing your personal IP address as they will all get given a cloudflare IP. Should be available on the free tier.

Thanks. I'm not really worried about my friend knowing my IP address so much that my IP address is easily discoverable by others. We've pretty much run out of IPv4 addresses and I imagine every single one of them gets probed quite often automatically.

Is it really worth the agro to save 20 USD a month? What happens if your Internet connection goes down and your friend needs information from your server for a critical meeting?

It's not that critical. If it were for business I'd definitely go the hosted route but it's just personal stuff and if my Internet were down she could wait.

What’s the friend’s project? Is this some short term educational thing?

Pretty much. Self-learning and personal development over the next few years. She's not in IT but I use JIRA routinely and it seemed a natural fit for what she wanted. She'd be ignoring a lot of the features but I can take her through creating projects and tickets easily enough and she doesn't really have any other management tools to help her stay on top of this stuff. I already use it for my own needs so I just want to say "Here's an account on mine, have fun!".