Every public request to one of my sites used to go through a Cloudflare tunnel. I had a cloudflared deployment in my cluster, some routing rules, and everything just worked. And it was free! But that bugged me. TANSTAAFL right? The whole point of selfhosting is to not rely on big cloud company, and there are few bigger than Cloudflare. And Cloudflare’s tunnels decrypt every single packet, so they see everything you do. I really don’t like that.
So I’ve replaced Cloudflare tunnels with Erwan Leboucher’s towonel, a selfhosted tunnel implementation. I still have my DNS on Cloudflare, but no data is moving through them any more.
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Self hosted alternative is buying a static IP from your ISP I suppose. Mine is an extra $5/mo which is eh, but I’m not paying for a VPS.
As far as I know an ISP has to provide one at your request in Europe. Idk if it’s free.