I am certain this is an area my self hosted solutions lack, but still happy to share.

For me accessibility is the most important, and I have family that’s not technically savvy, so vpns/Wireguard arent great for my use case. So I use a reverse proxy to expose certain apps and have fail2ban configured to block/ban ips that misbehave. This essentially blocks people trying to guess accounts and I’ve been toying with some ratelimiting. However, as many will say, this is not a very secure system and I should monitor my local traffic more to be aware of bad actors.

At the end of the day though it’s really a battle of ease vs security. Reverse proxies provide easier access, but more risk compared to things like vpns. Also, SSH should be setup for key only (no password) and should never be exposed to the public internet (so no reverse proxy).