Selfhosted

if you want more users you can host headscale instead of using tailscale, users can still connect with the regular tailscale clients

additionally you can use forward auth on your reverse proxy using something like authentik so that users have to be logged in before they can even see the service itself. personally I trust authentik more than I trust all of the individual services which might not have the same level of scrutiny applied to their security. it also has the added bonus of letting your users use SSO if your services support it.

Tunnel is fine security wise. Keep the reverse proxy anyway and let the tunnel point at it. Routing, logs, etc. stay in one place this way.

Zero Trust with Google etc. is the way for family. Tailscale or Wireguard means installing a VPN client and making sure it keeps running, that's too much for most people who just want to click a link.

So my setup rigjt now:

• vps with headscale
• all devices connect to it
• in my home lab a vm running a tailscale client and a reverse proxy with a Wildcard cert
• all other services run as their own VMS and the proxy routes to them
• i have a dmz (not yet public) running a proxy with tailscale again for a different domain
• dmz runs a authentik vm which i use for access controll and user management
• backup Server connects to tailscale as well and proxmox pushes zfs snapshots every day

My long term goal is to move to pangolin as a reverse proxy on the vps and tailscale alternative and remove tailscale, as i find its very battery inefficient on Android (no subnet Router etc).

So i just give people access to the VPN and send them an authentik invite and thats it. With pangolin i dont even have to give them a VPN access anymore, it can be done via authentik i think.

A vps is 3-6€ and the tailscale standard is 10€ so its even cheaper, but a bit more setup to maintain. But it allows a ton of users :) so i guess this would be the smallest change with the highest impact

Authentik is nice to have but a pain to set up as the oicd stuff can be tricky. Immich was super ez, nextcloud was OK, docspell was a pain and ocis does not work with authentik becsuse they use different architectures for sso. (Ocis and authentik are a bit dumb here)

For tailscale, unless you need different ACLs for every user, you could instead have additional friends share a single user and then you're only limited by the quite high device cap. Or self-host headscale on a VPS and then there are no user limits.

A reverse proxy is just for convenice of stuff like hostnames and ssl termination. It's not a security layer.

The proper way to do it would be to have your public stuff in a DMZ , if untrusted users (i.e. could have malware on their device) are going to access it.

Personally I use Netbird and host a tiny server in the cloud, which a local node connects to, to avoid NAT or firewall rules. Since it's self-hosted, there is no user limit.

With being behind a CGNAT tunnels is your only option.

Look into NGINX Proxy manager and DuckDNS