Tailscale, if you don’t want to make your services available to anyone else than you (and people you want to grant access to).

NGINX Proxy Manager and DuckDNS.

Get DuckDNS set up first.

Then go to DuckDNS.org and register a domain.

Then go into NGINX proxy manager.

It's pretty straightforward, click "add proxy host", then type the domain from duckdns (I like to do a different subdomain for each service, ie: calibre.mydomain.duckdns.org, homeassistant.mydomain.duckdns.org, etc.) and point it at your container with the service you want to access remotely.

You'll want to enable let's encrypt. But other than that the defaults should be fine.

Personally, I use headscale (self-hosted tailscale) that is open to the internet. Then my phone and all other devices use tailscale clients to connect to that. All my other services are accessed through the tailscale magic DNS service.

Nothing except headscale is open to the internet, and I can access anything I need on the server and other devices. It also doesn't just route All traffic through my server, only the stuff to other tailscale nodes.

Then just recently I've been using Nginx proxy manager and my DNS to make nicer names instead of memorizing a dozen ports for random services I host :p

I run my instance using cloudflare tunnels, directly from my thinkpad (over wifi), these tunnels are helpful because you don't need to open ports, etc, also, there are other tunneling options, like hosting a server on a VPS that tunnels to your own selfhosted server, as there are some alternatives to cloudflare in that aspect.

Idk, might be an option.

I am using wireguard for this purpose. My router supports that. It's a very easy setup and works fine in every is case I encountered except for android car. You do not expose anything to the outside. It's kind of like logging in to your home network.

Cloudflare Tunnels work great and are really easy to setup. Plus you are not exposing you machine completely to the outside, as the cloudflared service/container „calls out“, and Cloudflare is your reverse proxy. Downside is, you’re binding yourself to one of the US hyperscalers.

Pangolin uses the same principle, but is a bit more challenging to setup. Plus you need some kind of cloud server to make it work.

As you already have a VPN active at all times (at least it sounds like that), a VPN home seems out of the picture.

Unless you have a dedicated firewall at home, maybe reconsider the reverse proxy route. Personally would not feel comfortable with exposing a machine at home to the internet in full without a handle on what it can do or how it may be reached.

I went a different path than the VPN route that seems popular in the other comments...

I use a reverse proxy (caddy) with wildcard SSL (so all my hostnames aren't in the public cert registry) plus port knocking. So normally no outside IPs are allowed to access my internal services, but I can knock and then access anything for a while. Working well so far.

I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP

You don’t have to route all traffic through the VPN. Only traffic for your home network.

I'll recommend netbird as its entirely running on your server, is free, and I found it way easier to set up compared to Tailscale/Headscale

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

[Thread #110 for this comm, first seen 22nd Feb 2026, 16:31] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

My recommendation is a VPN server to connect in from outside and have the default gateway for the VPN clients be a server that acts as a router that's set up with your commercial VPN.

That way, you can be outside on a phone or a computer, access your internal network and still have your public internet traffic go out through your commercial VPN without having to be able to configure multiple VPN connections at once (eg. Android doesn't support that).

Eg. 2 debian proxmox containers. One that runs wireguard (head/tailscale might also work here?) for external access and one that runs mullvad(or whoever) VPN cli and IP forwarding to be the gateway for your clients.

Only downside is the extra hops to send everything through your home network first rather than straight to the commercial vpn which is probably fine depending on your speeds. You can always disconnect and connect directly to the commercial VPN for faster internet traffic if you need to.

I’ve been looking at VPNs, but it feels weird, to route everything through my home IP when I’m also trying to use a commercial VPN for privacy / to combat services fingerprinting me based on my IP.

My ASUS WRT router (running Merlin Firmware) forwards my Home WireGuard VPN server through one of my Proton VPN clients, I get all the added bonuses of being connected to my home network, utilizing my PiHole an such, while benefiting from appearing across the world.

I'm currently considering a reverse proxy setup with an authentication provider like authentik or authelia, but as far as I understand, that wouldn't work well with accessing services through an app on my mobile device (like for jellyfin music for example.)

This is correct, you cannot host an authentication service in front of Jellyfin’s proxy otherwise the Jellyfin Media Player will not connect to your server however, there is a Jellyfin SSO plugin for authentication which is what I use and I disabled the manual login form via CSS but be warned if you take this route that the CSS can be re-enabled on the login screen using your browsers element inspect, I wish you can disable it outright but it’s heavily baked into Jellyfin from what I’ve read.

I suggest setting up a IP-Blacklist for Jellyfin and only whitelisting the known IP’s.

Tailscale or Netbird, any of them is better than setting up DDNS and securing the network access yourself.

My Ubiquity Dream Machine has Wireguard integrated. So it's literally just a few clicks to spin up a server. I use it in combination with a port forward on my FritzBox and a dyn ip using https://dynv6.com/ and a domain i had laying around anyways.

Regarding Wireguard: Wireguards (imho) best feature is split tunneling. You can decide which ips or subnets to route through the tunnel. See AllowedIPs.

As a default it says something like

AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0

Which means "just route everything through me".

However you could allow your subnets only. Like this I use my private and my business vpn at the same time.

AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.0/24,10.0.1.0/24,10.0.2.0/24,10.0.3.0/24

You mentioned, that you have not a lot experience with networking, so your subnet may look like that. Just check your local ip and replace the last digit with 0/24

AllowedIPs = 192.168.2.0/24

I've been using frp to create a reverse proxy between my NAS at home and a DigitalOcean droplet. Been using it for over a year now, and not had any issues.

Personally, i would use VPN, Pihole for Local-DNS Records and a simple Local Reverse Proxy to address my Network-Services. I wouldnt open anything from my Homelab to the Internet.

Thanks for asking! I have the same problem, so eager to read the comments. Could you share what you choose in the end and why?

For the unprivileged container thing, containers tend to be lighter on resources than VMs at the cost of a little isolation (they share the same kernel as proxmox which could have security implications).

The ability for lxc containers to run unprivileged with all the restrictions that entails alleviates a bit of that security risk.

Both options are generally considered pretty secure but bugs/vulnerabilities could break isolation in either case. The only real 100% safe isolation is bare metal.

I tend to run containers unless I have a really good reason to need a VM, and run unprivileged unless I have a really really good reason not to.

Your mileage may vary, as it's a project that doesn't look to be actively worked on anymore, but selfhosted-gateway is a simple wireguard docker setup that's relatively easy to set up. It spins up the relevant proxies and tunnel, Doesn't cost anything, nor is there any signups etc... all you need is a VPS, a domain name and a home machine.

Have a look at Zerotier. I have some devices running it and it works a treat. Basically, add devices to your network and it gives them addresses that you can access as if it was on your home network. Your usual 192.168.. still work, but also you can choose a bunch like 172.25.. that you can only access when running Zerotier.

I use it to access jellyfin from my phone or laptop or to SSH into my server.