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Hi everyone, welcome back

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So today we're going to try something a little bit different

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We're gonna start a new video series

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about all the different ways to expose or access our homelab

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from the internet

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The reason is mainly because there's tons of options out there.

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and i feel like it's not talked enough about on YouTube

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Especially the security part

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which is most important

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almost everyone just assumes it's secure which isn't always the case

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so make sure to hit the like button

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subscribe

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and let's get started

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okay so how to do it

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to expose our homelab there are five main ways

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1. Secure Tunnels like Cloudflare

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2. Reverse proxies like Nginx

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3. Traditional VPNs like Wireguard or OpenVPN

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4. Mesh VPNs like ZeroTrust and Tailscale

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and lastly the old classic port forwarding or NAT

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So let's break down each one of them quickly to understand the differences

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first secure tunnels like Cloudflare

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This is often defined as secure tunnels to access your app without exposing your IP address

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making remote access easy

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it's also fairly easy to setup

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however, by default it's not secured enough

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and solely reling on your app security

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but this can be improved

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we'll cover this later in another video

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next reverse proxies

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like nginx

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it's a server that sits in the middle and forward requests to your homelab

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helping you manage multiple services under one domain

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while adding another layer of protection

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you will have more control over your services

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and how to manage them

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however, it exposes your IP and you must open a port on your router to access it

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next, traditional VPNs like Wireguard or OpenVPN

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it created an encrypted tunnel between your device and

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your home lab

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making it feel like you are on the same local network

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it's good for privacy and security

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but only useful when you are the only user because

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it's impossible to share access without sharing your private key

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to other users

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next, mesh VPNs

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like ZeroTier or Tailscale

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this is similar to normal VPns except it connects devices between each other

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instead of connecting them to a central server

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it has more control over normal VPNs in the way that you can choose which devices to share

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but you must manually join the network

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each time for each devices you want to give access to

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finally NAT this is a classic way of opening specific ports on your router

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to expose your homelab

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it's simplicity also carries high security risk if you rely on it alone.

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keep in mind NAT often gets used with other

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methods like previously showed

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but going purely [on it's own] port forwarding is a no-go for security setups

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Now, you may be wondering,

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What's the most secure setup?

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to expose your home lab?

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Actually,