I want to expose my services publicly on my own domain name, how would you guys do that?
I have seen people using Cloudflare, but I don’t want to use Cloudflare out of principle. I have also seen stuff on caddy and frp that I’ve done some rough researching.
What do you guys do?


Keep in mind that you wouldn’t route local traffic through it, so everything watched at home would be direct and not count.
I have a $5/mo VPS with OVH and they allow unlimited bandwidth within reason. Unless you have multiple households streaming from your server all the time, likely totally fine. If you do end up with one relative streaming 24x7, then I would look at installing the tailscale app on their TV and configuring things to connect that one user direct to your home server.
A VPS takes some learning, but IMHO, it is the “correct” answer and worthile learning.
How do you set up security on your server with the constant attacks that come with having the server public?
There are constant scanners on any site and scrapers on websites, but it is far less of a problem than you would imagine unless you have a big wiki or software forge with hundreds of nested commit history pages for them to spider into.
I also run private servers on hidden subdomains (with wildcard certs and DNS entries), so the low effort scanners never bother them.
DDOS attacks take money, so they aren’t typically going to go after some random homelabber. If it did happen, I would either just shut it off for a while or change the VPs IP. Ovh also has some of its own ddos protection.
That sounds perfect, I might go with ovh, how do you like them? The $4.54/mo plan looks cool
Their admin interface is slow and awkward, but otherwise happy. Their deals are always changing and I currently have good specs for the money. EU company and my machine is in Montreal, so I was happy with non-American hosting and green electricity.