EXPOSE your Homelab to the INTERNET?! (Be Careful)

Hi everyone, welcome back

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

We're gonna start a new video series

about all the different ways to expose or access our homelab

from the internet

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

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

Especially the security part

which is most important

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

so make sure to hit the like button

subscribe

and let's get started

okay so how to do it

to expose our homelab there are five main ways

1. Secure Tunnels like Cloudflare

2. Reverse proxies like Nginx

3. Traditional VPNs like Wireguard or OpenVPN

4. Mesh VPNs like ZeroTrust and Tailscale

and lastly the old classic port forwarding or NAT

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

first secure tunnels like Cloudflare

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

making remote access easy

it's also fairly easy to setup

however, by default it's not secured enough

and solely reling on your app security

but this can be improved

we'll cover this later in another video

next reverse proxies

like nginx

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

helping you manage multiple services under one domain

while adding another layer of protection

you will have more control over your services

and how to manage them

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

next, traditional VPNs like Wireguard or OpenVPN

it created an encrypted tunnel between your device and

your home lab

making it feel like you are on the same local network

it's good for privacy and security

but only useful when you are the only user because

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

to other users

next, mesh VPNs

like ZeroTier or Tailscale

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

instead of connecting them to a central server

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

but you must manually join the network

each time for each devices you want to give access to

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

to expose your homelab

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

keep in mind NAT often gets used with other

methods like previously showed

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

Now, you may be wondering,

What's the most secure setup?

to expose your home lab?

Actually,