I’ll admit I’ve only really been doing all of this fun self-hosting stuff for about 4 years now but I have been learning computer since Apple II. With my local fiber internet I have a static IP address and seem to have no barriers to expose my hosted websites to the internet. I’ve never used cloudfare and can’t imagine why I would need it. Use NGINX reverse proxy manager at both home and work. Some people have to jump through all these hoops and I’m just curious to know what situations necessitate all the extra hassle.

  • sysadminafterdark@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    You use Cloudflare to proxy, or in other words, hide your IP. Anyone can hit your DNS records, grab your IP and start DDOSing or hacking on it. They also have some nice features to force security features like HSTS or WAF rules. I’d recommend looking into it, not proxying your public IP is an amateur move. As for using NGINX proxy manager, consider using standalone NGINX and writing your own configuration files. There’s a pretty big security issue with it the lead developer refuses to patch.