Comment on Looking for Advice with networking between VPS, Homelab and Cloudflare
dr_robot@kbin.social 7 months ago
What benefit do you get from running a Cloudflare proxy if you're directing it to a VPS? I used to run with a Cloudflare proxy when my reverse proxy was hosted at home. Since then, I've moved it to a VPS and I no longer use the Cloudflare proxy, because I only expose the IP address of the VPS which is fine. Arguably Cloudflare provides you with DDoS protection, but that's so far never been a problem for me.
7Sea_Sailor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Caching, DDOS and other protections, centralized DNS management of all my domains scattered around different registrars, zero trust for sensible dashboards, and most important of all: it makes me feel good that the server IP is just a tad more secret.
dr_robot@kbin.social 7 months ago
For caching, are you sure you're generating enough traffic to benefit from it? Plus, CDN caching's strength only really comes into play when the users are geographically distributed which isn't really the case for most self hosters.
For DDoS check if your VPS host does DDoS protection. Some do and include it for free. I've been monitoring my server traffic lately. Since I've ditched Cloudflare, I haven't needed DDoS protection.
You can still use Cloudflare DNS without redirecting traffic via their CDN. I do that.
The point about not revealing the IP address is a personal one it seems. I think it indeed does matter if that IP address is if your home, but not so much of it's of a VPS in some data center. But anyway, this point seems personal.
However, everything is a trade off and everybody has a personal take on which trade off they want to take. When I was in a similar situation, I ditched CDN proxying via Cloudflare though I still kept them for DNS.