this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026

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Ways to Expose Services Publicly (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 week ago by pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I want to expose my services publicly on my own domain name, how would you guys do that?

I have seen people using Cloudflare, but I don't want to use Cloudflare out of principle. I have also seen stuff on caddy and frp that I've done some rough researching.

What do you guys do?

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[–] spork@pawb.social 32 points 1 week ago* (3 children)

I rent a cheap VPS with iptables routing ports through a wireguard tunnel to a peer on the local network that acts as a firewall and reverse proxy, this gives you a static IP with a local control plane and no ddns.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com [S] 9 points 1 week ago (5 children)

What's a cheap vps you recommend?

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[–] sulfidedisburseangledafternoontipper@piefed.blahaj.zone 12 points 1 week ago (1 child)

I use a cheap racknerd vps via low end box. $12/yr.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com [S] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That's crazy cheap price. Does it really have enough bandwidth to stream jellyfin?

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[–] MangoPenguin@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

Most VPS are on 1Gbps connections, but even if it only has 100Mbps that's plenty.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com [S] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

Is there a data cap? I'm concerned like they only allow me to pass through like a TB or so of data passing through it within a month. If you have users watching your jellyfin server every day that can surpass your limit.

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[–] MangoPenguin@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago

Yes generally around 1TB on cheap plans. That's a ton of data though for streaming media, if youre moving more than that getting a higher tier VPS would make sense.

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[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 week ago (1 child)

Keep in mind that you wouldn't route local traffic through it, so everything watched at home would be direct and not count.

I have a $5/mo VPS with OVH and they allow unlimited bandwidth within reason. Unless you have multiple households streaming from your server all the time, likely totally fine. If you do end up with one relative streaming 24x7, then I would look at installing the tailscale app on their TV and configuring things to connect that one user direct to your home server.

A VPS takes some learning, but IMHO, it is the "correct" answer and worthile learning.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com [S] 0 points 1 week ago (1 child)

How do you set up security on your server with the constant attacks that come with having the server public?

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[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

There are constant scanners on any site and scrapers on websites, but it is far less of a problem than you would imagine unless you have a big wiki or software forge with hundreds of nested commit history pages for them to spider into.

I also run private servers on hidden subdomains (with wildcard certs and DNS entries), so the low effort scanners never bother them.

DDOS attacks take money, so they aren't typically going to go after some random homelabber. If it did happen, I would either just shut it off for a while or change the VPs IP. Ovh also has some of its own ddos protection.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com [S] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

That sounds perfect, I might go with ovh, how do you like them? The $4.54/mo plan looks cool

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[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

Their admin interface is slow and awkward, but otherwise happy. Their deals are always changing and I currently have good specs for the money. EU company and my machine is in Montreal, so I was happy with non-American hosting and green electricity.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com [S] 0 points 1 week ago (1 child)

Epic. You probably don't use the admin interface too much right? Probably just configure your reverse proxy a leave it. Gonna rent a vps here in the states.

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[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 days ago (1 child)

Indeed, I log in pretty rarely.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com [S] 1 point 4 days ago

I keep thinking to myself whether $5/mo or buying a firewall and attempting to achieve the same thing is a better idea

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[–] sulfidedisburseangledafternoontipper@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 week ago

Yes. (Depending on load) I run a server with 10 users, probably 2-3 active at any given time. Works fine.

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[–] spork@pawb.social 9 points 1 week ago (1 child)

I hop around a lot. I’ve used Akamai (fka linode), Vultr, DigitalOcean, AWS EC2, and GCP Compute Engine. I wouldn’t recommend the last 2 anymore because fuck big tech. A lot of people will mention Oracle’s free tier, but I don’t trust anyone that looks like Larry Ellison to own a machine with a direct connection into my local network.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com [S] 3 points 1 week ago

I resonate with you as well, so what kind of set up do you use now?

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[–] TheRedSpade@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

Linode has a $5/month option.

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[–] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 10 points 1 week ago

@TheRedSpade @pineapplelover Linode got acquired by Akamai and their service (or at least, *my* VPS) has really gone downhill over the past few years.

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[–] state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago

Oracle has a free tier where I run my Wireguard.

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[–] shadshack@feddit.online 1 point 1 week ago

Look into Oracle cloud's Always Free tier of cloud instances. I have a few of those and they're decent for free.

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[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 5 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

Same but nftables and also crowdsec.

Also I had some trouble with the wireguard tunnel dropping lots of packets, which resulted in my services not loading 50% of the time. I did a lot of suggestions at the same time so I'm not sure which one fixed it but here is a list in case anybody has similar troubles:

lowering MTU
routing ipv6 through the tunnel as well
rewriting nftables rule order
...

(will update after work, notes are at home)

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[–] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

I'm running into similar issues, do you mind expanding on your solutions?

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[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'm still having trouble with it and I'm currently traveling. My analysis so far points to my vps provider being at fault.

I tried doing long term diagnostics, which effectively pinged through the tunnel every 5s and that make it work constantly and perfectly. So maybe some energy saving sleep stuff, which ends up breaking the tunnel?

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[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 4 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

Similar here. Just a Digital Ocean droplet running Pangolin. Functions basically the same as the cloudflare tunnel it replaced.

Can expose the service directly if needed, or from behind a login page.

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[–] Railcar8095@lemmy.world 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

The basic 4 dolars one? Or something extra?

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[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 1 point 4 days ago

Pangolin officially says on their site :

Pangolin generally requires minimal resources to run effectively. A basic VPS with 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, and 8GB SSD is sufficient for most deployments.

If you choose a VPS with only 1GB RAM, you may need to create swap space to avoid memory pressure during installation, updates, or periods of higher traffic.

I've got a 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 25GB Disk droplet for $6/mo and have no issues for my limited home use. Updates don't really take a noticeably long time or anything, it takes maybe 45 seconds to fully bring up the docker container again after an update. But it runs just fine.

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