How realistic is this concern? Like actually?

I’ve self hosted my own stuff for close to a decade now. Nobody has tried DDoSing my setup, because why would they? What benefit would they possibly get out of it? I would be pretty much the only person affected, and once they stop it wouldn’t take long to recover.

There is little to no incentive to DDoS a personal box, let alone by a “internet rando”.

Having played games online: what they gain could be as stupid as "haha I inconvenienced you because you pissed me off"

The chance of meeting someone online that’s that immature and spiteful, and at the same time possesses enough knowledge to successfully execute a DDoS attack is infinitesimally small.

Umm, you don't.. Umm, do you know any teenagers?

> enough knowledge to successfully execute a DDoS attack

You are drastically overestimating a teen's abilities.

Just pinging the IP over and over again isn't really going to do much. Maybe a DoS attack depending on what the target network has in terms of IPS, but even then it's more likely they'll infect their computers with viruses before they get the chance to actually attack you.

On the contrary, you're vastly underestimating the availability of various "booting" and "IP stressing" services that sell a 30 minute 1Gbps+ DDoS attack to anyone for $5. Launching a DDoS attack is just as easy, if not easier than, signing up for Netflix. Many of them even offer cheap monthly packages for people to use at will with no marginal cost to them.

I've personally been on the receiving end of one of those for somehow pissing off a cheater in GTA 5. It definitely happens and it's not fun.

I've remember when I've played Rust, year or two ago on public server. Some kid was mad, because thought that some one was cheating. He managed to DOS that server. And globally it doesn't sound hard: google -> ddos > low orbit ion canon(as one of the most famous) -> fire in the hole! Especially if you are dumb enough to just run that tool as is, without any tries to hide your own personality.

there’s also the concern of finding where i live from my ip. i like to keep some level of privacy among my online friends.

I use a Digital Ocean vm as a public-facing reverse proxy with a Wireguard tunnel back to my homelab, where everything is actually hosted.

That’s interesting. Do use a dynamic IP at home in this case or static? If it’s dynamic, what does the update process look like?

Edit: It looks like this might be automatic. This is something interesting I should look into a bit. It’s probably just extra complexity for my little server, but I’ve got some uses in mind.

I do something similar, the actual server connects to the tunnel VPS, not the other way around. The server doesn't actually have a public IP address.

like dvdkon says, only the VPS has a static public address, and my homelab reaches out to keep the tunnel alive.

Tehcnically my homelab is also on a static public IP as well--this was more an exercise in "could I do this" than "actually necessary," but it's still cool as hell and I'm very happy.

About the only hangup was I had to configure Wireguard to keep the tunnel alive, otherwise sometimes the VPS would receive incoming traffic and if my lab hadn't reached out in a while (which, why would it?) the tunnel would be down, and the proxy connection would die. Thankfully that's built-in functionality.