Just getting started with self hosting. I was wondering if anyone had experience with Cloudflare Tunnels for exposing their services to the internet. I like the simplicity and security it offers but don’t love the idea of using Cloudflare. Like, I’m self hosting for a reason lol. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!
For context, I’m running all of my services in a very small k8s cluster and my priorities are mostly security then maintainability. Thanks yall!
Warning: Cloudflare Tunnel ToS explicitly prohibits hugh-bandwidth activities on it, naming media streaming in particular. Some people take the chance anyway until Cloudflare might suddenly terminate your connection, it’s merely a low-stakes risk to using it.
Also worth mentioning: Cloudflare has historically had some involvement with DMCA detection and take down, so if your running a media server with them able to MitM your traffic, they’re almost certainly able to detect and scan if they so chose. They’re a big company so they may not do any relevant scanning on your Tunnel, or you may have only completely Public Commons content on your server, but something you should be aware of.
Related: I was doing something similar also from Ohio not that long ago. It turned out that most of the ISPs in Ohio have horrible reputations in the global network routing, so they are given low-priority and poor interconnects to other Internet routing companies. It affected both my incoming and outgoing network speeds and reliability. Cloudflare speed tests were the only ones giving any good values, I constantly had disconnects and timeouts for everything else. But when I put a VPN (that had a decent interconnect) on my router with an exit node in D.C. or Chicago, suddenly all my speeds went back to normal values matching Cloudflare results.
TL;DR your ISP having a poor reputation with their gobal interconnects is very likely to blame for the poor speed issues without Cloudflare Tunnel, and literally any tunneling solution would probably resolve it.