Comment on Hosting external services
WASTECH@lemmy.world 1 week ago I would like to avoid paying for a VPS. I probably should have clarified in my post too that I am specifically looking for advise on securing public facing services. While I certainly could make everyone use a tailscale-like service, at this point I think securing an external service would be easier. Especially since most of these people would not be tech savvy and I don’t particularly want to play tech support for their VPN.
I would like to avoid paying for a VPS
Oracle cloud free tier, but it does have a history of randomly killing the VPS’s created.
Public ipv4 addresses are scarce, and becoming more expensive now. You are probably going to have to shell out some cash if you don’t already get one as part of your internet plan.
WASTECH@lemmy.world 1 week ago My ISP is charging $20/mo for static IP’s, so almost any other solution would be cheaper.
I hate Oracle with the passion of a thousand suns, so I don’t want to touch them with a 10ft pole. I would happily pay anyone else to avoid using anything affiliated with Oracle.
ngrok allows up to 1 gigabyte out. it is not a good deal compared to cloudflare tunnels. the vps with pangolin is the best option on the table if I’m going to be honest
Vittelius@feddit.org 1 week ago
That’s what pangolin is. Your users don’t need to use anything special. The VPN is used internally to connect your server and the VPS. It’s not actually public facing. For the enduser it’s the same as if you used cloudflare tunnels.
One word of warning if you choose to go with Cloudflare: Using their tunnels for streaming video is technically against their TOS. It’s not really enforced most of the time, but you might run into problems, if you plan on really high usage.
An alternative service is Netbird. Open Source, based in Germany and as far as I know they don’t have this limitation
Thanks for the warning. My Plex server is currently behind a Cloudflare tunnel, so I probably need to look at moving that.
I mistook pangolin for netbird, so thanks for the clarification!
Vittelius@feddit.org 1 week ago
Happy to help. One further point of clarification: Netbird traditionally was a VPN solution that required client software on the end user device, that’s what you were thinking of presumably. However they recently-ish expanded into offering reverse proxy services as well: docs.netbird.io/manage/reverse-proxy
So if you are looking for a cloudflare tunnels alternative and don’t want to go the fully selfhosted route, then Netbird can do that. I can’t speak to it’s reliability though, because I run a selfhosted Pangolin for my setup, and Netbird themselves mention that the feature is currently still in beta.