How do I setup a tunnel for self hosting a web page, so I do not have to open ports in my firewall?
And go...
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Cloudflare
Tunnel | Zero Trust App Connector | Cloudflare
Connect applications, servers, and other resources to Cloudflare's network via encrypted outbound tunnels. No publicly routable IPs or VMs required.
That looks like what I already have setup.What else is there?
you have opened port 80 on your router. This means that if someone finds your IP they can access that port directly.
with a cloudflare tunnel you can don't actually open any ports but run a small cloudflare client locally that handle it for you
So I install the cloudflare client and close port 80.
this also means that you can set access restrictions on cloudflare and for example only allow access from your own country
I click the link, but it took my to my already exhisting dashboard. I have not found the link to download the tunneling client yet.
Cloudflare Tunnel · Cloudflare Zero Trust docs
Cloudflare Tunnel provides you with a secure way to connect your resources to Cloudflare without a publicly routable IP address. With Tunnel, you do …
Thank you!
I am going to keep the post open until I go over everything in case I have followup questions. It seems straight forward though.
in the olden days, i would say to seup a separated / dmz'd lan so that the webserver sits on it's own network away from the rest of your internal stuff
but now, I would say just spend the 5 bucks a month to host it on a vps
and dont' bother setting up something on your home network
I am doing a little of all of the above. This is more for proof of concept, experience and for testing small projects.
With the 50 user limit, does that mean only 50 people can view the site at one time?
@ghostmonkey I'd say it depends a bit on what you're doing. I use tailscale to access my local home server
sure, there are reasons to access you home server remotely, but I do not think serving a website is a good one, when the alternatives are much better options
There are many rabbit holes I could go down. For the purpose of this post it is just for testing and to say I did. I would either setup a separate network at home and/or use a web hosting services if I were to push something out to the masses.
Perhaps in different posts I can explore things like how to better secure externally deployed websites and how to tunnel back into my home network for various benefits.
My projects may not have practical uses except for the process of learning.
Just consider me in school except I am self educating and bettering myself while avoiding the high cost and I can do it on a tight schedule.
I will assume that the 50 user limit means no more than 50users accessing the site at one time and that I will have to look at different options when I am done playing around.
I would only add, you do what you feel is best for your situation and what you want to learn. But if you are pursuing an interest in front end / web development, knowing how to setup and host a local webserver is very far down on the list of skills you would actually use in practice, whereas, learning how to develop a site locally and then push to production is a critical skill you will use constantly. So, in that sense, learning how to deploy your page to a VPS would give you a lot more useful knowledge
I absolutely appreciate all the feedback and help from everyone!!!
Does it count that I have deployed a site through cpanel and the web hosting company uses VPS for their setup? I have a different domain pointing to cloudflare and cloudflare to the hosting company. Is thre anything I should change about that setup??
Or are we talking about a vps like having a local server running something like proxmox and a server on top running a website?
for VPS, i mean something like contabo, hetzner, hostinger, whoever, but choosing their VPS option and not the wordpress or other hosted website builder plan. Setting up a VPS means you start from bare metal, choose the OS, and everything else, and then actively manage it yourself, and not through a secondary hosting agency.
And most importantly, that you setup a local development environment, and then push your work through github to be published to your VPS
And to me, cpanel and *(wordpress i assume) managed by a hosting company does not count. But, if you are planning to free lance or do wordpress based work, then yes it would be useful to know how to do that, otherwise no
Or, if you are not making pages thatt need backends, and can run serverless, then use Vercel / Netlify / type solutions