Centralization is bad for everyone everywhere.
That bring said… I just moved my homeserver to another city… and I plugged in the power, then I plugged in the ethernet, and that was the whole shebang.
Tunnels made it very easy. No port forwarding no dns configuration no firewall fiddling no nothing.
Why do they have to make it so so easy…
Unless you are behind CGNAT; you would have had the same plug+play experience by using your own router instead of the ISP supplied one, and using DDNS.
At least, I did.
Yes, but it does expose your own IP address and thus where you live. Tunnels don’t.
True, but the downside of cloudflare is that they are a reverse proxy and can see all your https traffic unencrypted.
Yes, but if you host a public site it might be a better option, the content is public anyway, and you won’t get doxed if you publish something controversial. It’s a trade-off, between keeping traffic private or keeping your IP private. Wireguard works best for private traffic, but you can’t host a public site with that.
Of course you can! Nginx and wireguard on a VPS and actual services wherever you want.
Not entirely. CF can protect you from DDOS of up to a few millions of calls per minute. Your home router would melt with that traffic. They also act as a firewall if you enable the proxy dns feature. They do a sanity check before forwarding the call. Also a home router cannot do this. And there’s more.
Both your ISP and CF will drop you like a hot potato if you’re ever under that kind of attack.
CF has other features that are nice like, like WAF, bot detection, geo blocking, caching etc. But it’s only a taste.
All their real services are paid and the whole reason they offer a free tier is to upsell you to their paid services.