VPN is the way to go. Could use this opportunity to upgrade your router. I bought a box from protectli and run OPNsense on it. There's good documentation on how to set up a wireguard vpn, and the community is vibrant.

Its also nice because there's lots of options so its a nice thing to grow and learn with.

Use tailscale

Use cloudflared and Cloudflare Zero Trust / Access. You tunnel your services to Cloudflare, who then secures them behind a 2FA wall. No traffic ever goes to anyone aside from you.

Try using Tailscale. It's easy to use & free for personal use. It will only allow devices with Tailscale installed to view your self-hosted services. They have clients for mobile devices, PC's, Mac's and even Apple TV etc. Their technology is based on Wireguard so it's very fast and secure.

https://tailscale.com/

Seriously as everyone suggests: use tailscale or another VPN. Tailscale is incredbly easy to setup.

ZeroTeir (or a VPN) - if all you want is to access those services from outside your network

IMO - the only reason to put something “on the internet” is so that the entire “internet” can access it

Getting an obscure domain name doesn’t matter as attackers go straight to the IP address. If you have a certificate on your secret domain name, they have your domain the moment they hit port 443.

Don’t use “security through obscurity”; instead just secure your services or host a VPN.

If you go with a cert try to get a star cert that way you make it a little bit harder for hackers to find your subdomains.

This is my policy: For publicly accessible services like a website, I use a cloudflare tunnel. For restricted access to just a few users, I use a cloudflare tunnel and a cloudflare application to manage access authentication. For my exclusive restricted access to the infrastructure, I used tailscale.

6 to 9 digit .xyz domains are only around $1 a year, every year. That's what I did and definitely recommend it. You can read more here.

Warning: tk domains registrar has 0 GDPR.

Might be irrelevant now, but I didn't managed to delete my data once I wanted out

Crazy number domain doesn't provide any security but you can buy a 1.111B class .XYZ domain for as cheap as 0,62USD a year

• install opnsense
• set up geoip block where only IPs from your own country can ever initiate connection from the outside
• keep your stuff up to date
• enjoy security

If it is just for you and no one else you could set up something like twingate in place of a vpn or punching holes in your network. When im out of town or just need to access something internaly when im gone, as long as. I am connected to my twingate connector i have access the what i need. Its also super easy to granularly set access controls to only allow access to systems on specific ports etc. Took the headache of port forwarding, ipsec, and vpn and made it simple to manage and access what i need. Simply run the connector in docker and your all good. Heres the link if you wanna read up on it or try it out. link

cloudflare / cloudflared. No ports exposed, static or dynamic ips do not matter.

I use WireGuard for most stuff. My Nextcloud instance is open though because I lien to upload photos I take pretty quickly to keep a backup

VPN would be the quick and dirty

If it’s just select items, an service like azure app proxy maybe

Couldn't you just get a regular domain and use a firewall to prevent access, so only your IP address(s) are able to access it.

I'm currently doing this myself, however I have a VPN on my local network that allows me access to my self-hosted service remotely as if I was at home.

There are other things you can do with cloudflare that will lock the sites down with authentication, but VPN and firewall have worked pretty well for my use cases.

You could use Zerotier. With zerotier you can create a private network between your server and as many as 24 other devices (i.e your phone, your laptop...)

It doesn't expose your stuff to the whole internet. You have to manually approve the devices you want to add to the private network through zerotier website. Even if you share the links with other people, they will simply not work

I just did this for my Raspberry pi, and now pihole filters my internet traffic even when I'm away.

Seriously, look it up, it's free up to 25 connections and since it's private you don't need to go crazy about protecting your server from DDoS or buying a domain name or anything.

If the domain isn't critical if it changes, you could use freedns.afraid.org.

I've been using the free version for over a decade (but did donate recently). A couple of domains have come and gone, so I've had to pick new ones, but it's not a big deal.

For just yourself? Get a domain that you can actually remember and use and then set up a WireGuard server (I recommend the Linuxserver.io WireGuard image)

Use that to access your stuff

Do you have 1 thing you desparately need to be publicly accessible? VLAN the VM off so it's on its own and put a reverse proxy in front of it with HTTPS (and ideally MFA if you need auth)

Have you heard about Twingate? It's kinda like a VPN but not really. It's free and does everything I need. If it's just for self use I think it's enough.

Isn't this what VPNs were invented for?

this is what i did. a 10 CHAR domain of only numbers with .win

Free domains such as .tk or .cf are scanned by various bots as soon as they are created. I remember when I created a domain and forwarded it to my server. The spam and attacks that subsequently hit my server were very high. Significantly higher than with a domain that I paid for.

I therefore strongly recommend staying away from these free domains.

Good luck with your project :)

Out of curiosity. If someone is accessing self hosted services only from certain locations where ip addresses are known, is it a good idea to whitelist those ips in firewall and block external access for the rest?