OTOH I wouldn't want to self-host because I know I'm not going to spend the same amount of time and effort a full security staff would, even if my self-hosted box would make a much less attractive target.
It's quite a pickle.
Want to just encrypt everything on a node with no network access? Sure. That doesn't work for a "real" host but that is fine if you mostly use your phone and need to just occasionally sync your passwords back at home.
You don't need the things that make hosting hard. You can have a few hours of downtime. You password vault is gigabytes, not hundreds of terabytes. You don't need to arm guard your backups, just pass them (encrypted) to a friend with a safe.
I run it as a Docker instance on my home Synology NAS. This turned out to be pretty easy to do. The only part that was a slight hassle was buying a cert, creating an FQDN and making the DNS entries to get an SSL connection to the NAS. Also, I wish updating to a new version of Vaultwarden was a little more straightforward.
When I am at home, my devices with Bitwarden all sync to the Vautwarden instance on the NAS without issue.
My router is a Ubiquiti UDMPro. I have an L2TP VPN configured with a shared-secret and user passwords that are ridiculously long and complex. When I'm out and about and need to sync with the NAS from my laptop or mobile device, I activate the VPN and do the sync.
My Ubiquiti account does have 2FA.
I implemented all this when 1Password informed me that in order to continue using their service, my vault would have to be hosted on their server and I would have to pay them every month for the privilege. That was a nonstarter.
I'm sure my router and NAS are not impenetrable, but I don't feel like I'm low-hanging fruit either. And if someone went to the trouble of breaking in, their reward would be one guy's vault and not the vaults of millions of customers. I'm hoping that makes me a less attractive target. Of course the vault itself has a very long and complex password as well.
This is working out quite well for me so far, knock on wood.
My other concern, which may be unfounded is that Vaultwarden [1], which is an unofficial Rust rewrite, may also be developed to different, or lesser security standards than the official client. However I don't have any real reasons to suspect this.
Note that Synology DSM has built-in Let's Encrypt support
Yes... I tried going down that route. In my scenario, I'm accessing the NAS via its internal IP which is in an RFC1918 subnet. Let's Encrypt insists that you use a globally routable IP. If I used the public IP issed to me by my ISP, then I would have to map a port on my router and expose the NAS directly to the Internet. No way am I doing that.
I bought a cert through Namecheap and got 5 years for $29.95. That seemed quite reasonable to me. There was no problem getting it to work when I mapped the hostname to the NAS's internal IP. The only downside is that I have to go through a renewal process every year and install the updated cert on NAS. Not a huge deal; just one more thing I have to do.
Not necessarily. I wouldn't have felt compelled to redo all my passwords if 1Password's encrypted vaults were stolen the way LastPass's were, given that 1P's vaults are uncrackable with brute force but LastPass's critically depend on the entropy of the master password. This was discussed recently:
