You make a good point. But I still find that directly exposing a port on my home network feels more dangerous than doing so on a remote server. I want to prevent attackers sidestepping the proxy and directly accessing the server itself, which feels more likely to allow circumventing the isolations provided by docker in case of a breach.

Judging from a couple articles I read online, if i wanted to publicly expose a port on my home network, I should also isolate the public server from the rest of the local LAN with a VLAN. For which I’d need to first replace my router, and learn a whole lot more about networking. Doing it this way, which is basically a homemade cloudflare tunnel, lets me rest easier at night.

Your first paragraph hits the nail on the head. From what I’ve read, bots all over the net will find any openly exposed ports in no time and start attacking it blindly, putting strain on your router and a general risk into your home network.

Regarding bandwith: 100% of the traffic via the domain name (not local network) runs through the proxy server. But these datacenters have 1 to 10 gigabit uplinks, so the slowest link in the chain is usually your home internet connection. Which, in my case, is 500mbit down and 50mbit up. And that’s easily saturated on both directions by the tunnel and VPS. plus, streaming a 4K BluRay remux usually only requires between 35 and 40 mbit of upload speed, so speed is rarely a worry.

Hey! I’m also running my homelab on unraid! :D

The reverse proxy basically allows you to open only one port on your machine for generic web traffic, instead of opening (and exposing) a port for each app individually. You then address each app by a certain hostname / Domain path, so either something like movies.myhomelab.com or myhomelab.com/movies.

The issue is that you’ll have to point your domain directly at your home IP. Which then means that whenever you share a link to an app on your homelab, you also indirectly leak your home location (to the degree that IP location allows). Which I simply do not feel comfortable with. The easy solution is running the traffic through Cloudflare (this can be set up in 15 minutes), but they impose traffic restrictions on free plans, so it’s out of the question for media or cloud apps.

That’s what my proxy VPS is for. Basically cloudflare tunnels rebuilt. An encrypted, direct tunnel between my homelab and a remote server in a datacenter, meaning I expose no port at home, and visitors connect to that datacenter IP instead of my home one. There is also no one in between my two servers, so I don’t give up any privacy. Comes with near zero bandwith loss in both directions too! And it requires near zero computational power, so it’s all running on a machine costing me 3,50 a month.