I would go with wireguard VPN or something like cloudflare tunnels or tailscale. With wireguard you’ll need to open up an external port and forward to your VPN host, but wireguard uses UDP so no one can probe it for responses. CF tunnels and tailscale you don’t have to open up holes in your firewall which is nice.

You also have the option of using a proxy and opening up 443 publicly on your firewall, but unless you know what you’re doing I’d leave that closed until you learn more.

Yes, you can use a Cloudflare tunnel but why? Since you’re into self-hosting why should you depend on some random company to tunnel your traffic when you most likely don’t need it? You also have all the potential tracking, spyware, risks and “being hostage” scenarios that may come with that choice.

The following assumes your use case is a simple home server for “standard arr apps, jellyfin, pi-hole” for personal usage that sits inside your network and your objetive is to be able to access those services. If you’re instead trying to host a game server / few services for friends (that doesn’t really need to be “inside” your home network) there’s a more complete comment with other security considerations and recommendations here.

Your basic requirements are:

• Some kind of domain / subdomain payed or free;
• Preferably Home ISP that has provides public IP addresses - no CGNAT BS;
• Ideally a static IP at home, but you can do just fine with a dynamic DNS service such as https://freedns.afraid.org/.

Quick setup guide and checklist:

1. Create your subdomain for the dynamic DNS service https://freedns.afraid.org/ and install the daemon on the server - will update your domain with your dynamic IP when it changes;
2. List what ports you need to access remote;
3. Setup Wireguard VPN on the server. There’s also this nice UI that can be used to do most of the setup and create client config files;
4. For the VPN use custom ports with 5 digits - something like 23901 (up to 65535) to make your service harder to find;
5. Configure your ISP router to assign a static local IP to the server and port forward the VPN port to the server IP;
6. Only expose absolutely required services (the VPN port in this case) to the Internet. Any service the server provides, SSH, configuration interfaces and whatnot can accessed through the WireGuard VPN;
7. In the server consider setting up nftables / iptables / another firewall 10 minute guide;
8. Configure nftables to only allow traffic coming from public IP addresses (IPs outside your home network IP / VPN range) to the Wireguard port - this will protect your server if by some mistake the router starts forwarding more traffic from the internet to the server than it should;
9. Configure nftables to restrict what countries are allowed to access your server. Most likely you only need to allow incoming connection from your country (https://wiki.nftables.org/wiki-nftables/index.php/GeoIP_matching).

Since you’re only allowing access to your services through the VPN and you’ve heavily restricted access to the VPN port you’ll be safe. Just a side note, don’t be afraid to expose the Wireguard port because if someone tried to connect and they don’t authenticate with the right key the server will silently drop the packets.

Now if your ISP doesn’t provide you with a public IP / port forwarding abilities you may want to read this in order to find why you should avoid Cloudflare and how to setup and alternative / more private solution.

Check out Tailscale. They have 20 machine limit on the free plan. It runs on wireguard and is pretty secure.

Maybe something like tailscale.

I use Tailscale with their DDNS feature that generates you a domain that resolves each of your Tailnet devices when connected. You can even run a command that generates an SSL cert for your given node and you can use that to further secure it with TLS in case you don’t want to deal with untrusted cert warnings.

This is especially useful for iPhones because they won’t keep your Tailscale VPN always on, but you can configure it so that requests to specific domains will activate and use your Tailscale VPN, which you just set to that generated one.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #319 for this sub, first seen 1st Dec 2023, 09:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Make your services password protected and have some software like fail2ban that blocks people from brute-forcing passwords.

Keep your software up to date.

It largely depends on what you mean by ‘anywhere’, in particular if you only want to access it from your own devices or also other people’s you can only access for a minute or two and where you can’t install anything.

Of course there is also the question which services you want to access, e.g. just Websites and -Applications over HTTPS or do you also want e.g. the pi-hole’s DNS service to be available.

Duckdns will give you a free domain name. Run wireguard on the machine to connect remotely. Only allow WG port for remote access. Optional limit app access in your webserver to your VPN and lan ips. You can also run something like adguard home to get ad blocking. In that case set your wg server ip as the dns server ip eg 10.0.0.1 and add your ddg domain name in adguard so it will resolve without having to do an external lookup when on the lan or vpn.

If its only you and you want best security, setup a VPN system. (Tailscale, Netbird, or others are quite easy)
If someone else should also, and you dont want everyone to have to use a VPN, then you can expose some services directly. Of course behind CGNat you need some third-party system to allow this (e.g. cloudflare or a rented server).

I am not a big fan of cloudflare, they are a huge centralized company, easily allowing tracking across websites with clear-text access and kinda discouraging learning how to secure things yourself (which you have to do anyways, because you are a service provider and only cloudflare is not enough if its still publicly accessible though them)
But in the end its your choice. They easily allow you as service provider to protect yourself from DDoS attacks or allowing IPv4 access when you are behind CGNat, things you just cannot easily do yourself, certainly not without costs.

If you are behind CGNAT, this might help you understand things a little better.

Why so complicated? Why not just SSH? Put it on some random port, make it public key login only, and you’re done.

As said in the thread, you need some kind of tunnel that stays up and doesn’t need to be fixed if the internet goes down.

Wireguard, or if wanting super easy setup, Tailscale version of Wireguard is great for this. Now you have a private IP address in your VPN network to your home server, that stays up and answers to HTTP. Next thing you need is a cheap VPS somewhere with a public IP address. When that is running, and is in the Wireguard network so you can access your home server from the VPS, you need a Nginx proxy in the public server. Either do it by hand, or use a service such as the Nginx Proxy Manager to handle the proxy setup.

How it basically works is you register a domain name (A, CNAME) to the public VPS service, then with Nginx you setup that anything coming in to the domain X should be proxied to the VPN IP address Y and port Z. Now you can add HTTPS to this domain and get a Let’s Encrypt certificate for it. You can, again, do this manually with Nginx, or let Nginx Proxy Manager handle it for you.

Finally. Stay safe. If you really open services to public internet from your home, be very sure to have all the latest updates and use strong passwords in all of them. Additionally, you can use the home services directly from the Wireguard/Tailscale network by accessing them using the private IP addresses. Your computer should just be in the same network with them.

Is ngrok still a thing?

You can also try looking into no-ip.