I have always been hesitant to self host anything I needed access to outside of my local network. Security is hard and opening up ports to your home is scary stuff. Instead, I tend to lean on a cheap VPS for anything I need access to remotely.

That has started to change since I heard a recommendation for Tailscale. In short it is a service that let's you connect and coordinate machines across the internet as if they were on a single LAN over the secure Wireguard protocol. At a high level, I can install Tailscale as a VPN on my phone and access a Nextcloud instance on my home LAN without opening any inbound ports on my router!

I heard the idea originally on Linux Unplugged and tried it out over the holidays. And without a doubt, it has been the most exciting thing to happen to my home networking setup in some time. I encourage anyone reading to try the same!

(For example, I currently have a little NAS box hosting: Nextcloud, Jellyfin and Home Assistant. I am thinking of hosting little, toy CMS's on my LAN and add a ephemral key access in CI, which is super rad and saves hosting costs for my goofy little throw-away projects.)