A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I actually have Wireguard running on a pi zero 2, all it really does is provide me my pihole DNS.
Edit:
I should say I have pihole running on a couple of pi 5’s currently, overkill yes but one of my pi 4’s was sacrificed to the whims of magic smoke another was donated to a friend and another now hosts HAOS, I have a few pi zero 2’s (only one was sacrificial) the one that hosts wireguard has one of my last few working SD cards. The pi 5’s host many other things other than just pihole.
Taking do one thing, but do it good to the next level, nice!
I thought about getting a pi zero also just for the pi-hole. But my pi3b holds up pretty good, still
In the not to distant future I will be retiring wireguard from that pi zero 2 and turning it into a pots server. I have grand ambitions to make a better home lab with a few more pi’s and to help me get away from big tech more.
The only thing google I have is an email I do not use but so I can watch YouTube, but I use unwatched to block ads.
The only thing apple is my iPhone and my iPad, when it becomes time to replace those I will have to figure out graphenOS and some Linux distro for a tablet of some sort.
Wireguard.
Dunno if Cloudflare does effective auth for the tunnel or if you have to set that up yourself, but I don't bother trying to expose services to the internet in any way because some of this stuff was just never designed for proper web security (cough Jellyfin).
It's still worth setting up a wildcard cert with ACME so you get nice https and a real domain.
Cloudflare has some opt-in auth. Mail-OTP is a nice balance imo: You can allowlist mail addresses per service/subdomain and set expiry for each. Then for access, you first have to enter the mail address, get the OTP and then access the service.
So, nobody without access to allowed mail addresses even gets to knock on you door.
But yeah, that's why I think about going tail scale: why bother having something exposed when not needed?
I just think, some services might be nice to provide to friends, too - and having them connect to my tailnet for this is a bit too much friction, I guess
I'm liking self hosted NetBird atm
Wildcard dns with port 80 & 443 port forwarded to traefik with tinyauth & fail2ban
Did you get a static public IP from your ISP?
No, I use dynamic dns
Just Wireguard on a router, but I'm thinking Netbird.
WG can be a bit PITA to set up, but once you do, it just works. What I would to have is more fine grained control over who goes where if I were to expose some of the services to friends.
wg-easy can greatly simplify your wireguard setup. Allows you to quickly generate access configs for friends and family on the fly (QR-codes, too). You still get access to post-up/-down hooks if you want tp create a more specialised deployment.
Both.
I have a free vps providing me a public IPv4 address, connected to my opnsense router via tailscale, and use a simple port forward from the VPs to the router's tailscale IP.
I have certain port/connections coming in either via the tailscale IP or my external IPv6 address all forwarded to my internal Caddy reverse proxy which itself is only running IPv4.
And I use cloudflare for my dynamic DNS resolution of my domain. A records are my public VPS IPv4 and AAAA are my own public IPv6 addresses respectively.
If/when I change to a service provider that doesn't use CGnat for IPv4, I can stop doing the forwarding from my VPS.
That's so we can stream music/video without needing to use the VPN.
But, I also run tailscale on my phone, so I can do admin stuff remotely from it, albeit painfully, on this small screen when things break. 🤣
I have wireguard, it's supported by my router (Fritzbox).
Nice, I have to take a look if mine supports it, too!
same here, took me 7m to set this up on OPNsense with FritzBox
Pangolin on a vps.
When I looked into it first, Pangolin seemed a bit overwhelming.
Is it hard to set up?
No, ridiculously easy with docker.
Then it follows the same principles as cloud flare. Create a site (vpn endpoint), get a docker snippet for a newt (what they call the vpn connector), paste it in the docker compose on your Homeserver and see it come up in the Webinterface.
Then you create a public resource and point it to said site and give it a url.
Done.
Ask me if you have questions
Cool, do you get any auth and/or ingress protection?
With cloudflare, you get some auth options, can block AI crawlers (that get recognized...) etc for free
Yes there is auth on by default for resources. You can use real accounts that need to be created or passwords or pins. And I think some id providers.
isn't it awesome? i am scared to update it too far for an unknown reason
It's opensoursrso we should be able to roll back.
I am very happy with Tailscale
tailscale. works perfectly, the only problem is needing a google acc for login
Netbird allows email & TOTP 2FA.
And that years back they moved their servers from Canada to the US. That's when I dropped TS and just did wireguard by hand.
I do run wireguard on my router, but the main reason is ad blocking, not hiding services. Most services are publicly exposed.
Nice, I thought about using wireguard as a private VPN, too. Having my pihole block my mobile data on the go would be neat
It really is!
Headscale on fly.io
How about both? I run the evil Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust with Tailscale as an overlay on the server.
I'm a bit stumped, what do you gain from this setup?
Or do you mean just running some services through the tunnel for easy access and "hide" others behind tailscale?
what do you gain from this setup?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
[Thread #265 for this comm, first seen 30th Apr 2026, 19:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Asked my ISP for a public IP, exposed all things that can handle that to the public. Custom Wireguard server for VPN
Temp stuff where I could care less about the free tier domain name or things that I just want to funnel to my existing devices: Tailscale
Widespread, prolonged services that will be more actively maintained for a longer amount of time and can just spin off of its own domain/subdomain: Cloudflare
Both are great.
Wireguard