I read a comment on here some time ago where the person said they were using cloudflared to expose some of their self-hosted stuff to the Internet so they can access it remotely.
I am currently using it to expose my RSS feed reader, and it works out fine. I also like the simplicity of Cloudflare’s other offerings.
Any thoughts on why cloudflared is not a good idea? What alternatives would you suggest? How easy/difficult are they to setup?
I think concerns come in two flavours:
With that said, you’ll find several large lemmy instances (and many small ones) use cloudflare. While you’ll easily find people against its use, you’ll find many more people in the self-hosted community using it because it’s (typically) free and it works. If you want to use it, and you’re ok with the above, then go ahead.
In addition to the above, most of the percieved advantages of CF are non-existent on the free tier that most people use. Their “DDoS protection” just means they’ll drop your tunnel like a hot potato, and their “attack mitigation” on the free tier is a low-effort web app firewall (WAF) that you can replace with a much better and fully customizable self-hosted version.
There’s a third point which is: Things in CloudFlare are publicly accessible, so if you don’t put a service on front for authentication and the service you’re exposing has no authentication, a weak password or a security issue, you’re exposing your server directly to the internet and bad actors can easily find it.
Which is why some services that I don’t want to have complicated passwords are only exposed via Tailscale, so only people inside the VPN can access them.