alt Hacker News> Running a server used to be trivial: run an executable, tell people your address, done...
This works, until you have more than one person accessing your server. Then you need to worry about accounts, credentials, data isolation, etc. And then if a couple of people connect to your server and start using it, you have to worry about staying online, staying updated, backing up the data. But other than that... yes, trivial.
And just to be really explicit, you always have more than one person accessing your server, and most of the time they are unwanted users trying to break in.
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> most of the time they are unwanted users trying to break in.
Exactly. Of all the reasons why the average person doesn't have an Internet-visible server, NAT, I would say, is pretty far down on the list.
If the utility and functionality of the server requires those things, then they're required regardless of whether or not that server is internet-facing.
Jill from Elbonia may be always be a threat, but this doesn't mean that Joe from Accounting is not a threat or cannot ever provide a vector for Jill. :)
I mean, no, you don't have to worry about all that stuff unless the business logic demands it. The OP is entirely correct for eg just serving a static file.
> most of the time they are unwanted users trying to break in
Thankfully, we have wireguard now. It drops all packets by default. From the perspective of people who don't have the requisite cryptographic keys, it's like the computer is not even there to begin with.
I've always found it strange how people just put computers out there on the internet and just allow them to interact with total internet randoms. Why are we allowing our computers to talk to strangers? No wonder people are getting hacked.