Selfhosted

It's typically against the terms of service to open ports less than 1024 (well known ports) of most ISP's for personal internet. That, and there are bots that probe for insecure and misconfigured stuff constantly. Spin up a VPS and take a look at the SSH logs. What if a zero day vulnerability occurs? Are you going to be able to react quick enough to prevent someone from doing damage?

Cloudflare is nice because you no longer need to update your DNS A records, plus it caches data, automatically enables SSL, and absorbs bot traffic for you. Have also tried the Wireguard + VPS route, but that gets expensive because most charge ingress and egress.

If you are behind CGNAT, you don't have a lot more options. Also, some may not want to expose their home IP.

I don't like opening ports on my home router, because of the destination services behind the port forwarding. As long as those are secure there are no problems. But if a service has a vulnerability, someone could takeover my home network and creep around. That's scary.

When people use Cloudflare Tunnels to publish their stuff, they usually still have that problem. The idea is that Cloudflare is intrinsically safe and would block all attacks. I don't necessarily agree with that. But I assume it's safer than having no security layer between at all.

In general it's a matter of not exposing your home IP. There are some ISPs that won't give you a public IP either way, so in those cases something else is needed anyway.

Exposing your IP can lead to DDoS, mostly, which can or cannot be a big deal.

I think Cloudflare Tunnel is awesome for situations where you want to deploy one or two applications without getting a full reverse proxy like Traefik or Nginx handling everything especially if you’re dealing with CGNAT. Also, if you don’t want to manage your own authentication solution for locking down apps, Cloudflare makes these easy to apply to your applications.

So for users who once would have (and still do) open ports directly to each individual application with little to no authentication in between, these solutions offer a turnkey option to fix a lot of things that would otherwise have been out of reach.

Only one reason, i had a mail server previously. And buying a static ip from my isp was more expensive than renting a vps for 2$ a month.

Nowadays i just think its cool so that i can have a failover for critical services. (Only Vaultwarden for me) Also its nice to have your own full speed vpn.

And i also run rustdesk mirror server on it, to profit from the faster data connection on my vps.

do you know for sure that nothing is listening on it? Do you scan every device you connect to your network?