Selfhosted

Tailscale. You don't need to open up ports + you can set up exit nodes, which are useful if you're sailing the seven seas.

I self-host various applications and have been really happy with Wireguard. After watching just how hard my firewall gets hammered when I have any detectable open ports I finally shut down everything else. The WG protocol is designed to be as silent as possible and doesn't respond to remote traffic unless it receives the correct key, and the open WG port is difficult to detect when the firewall is configured correctly.

Everything - SSH, HTTP, VNC and any other protocol it must first go through my WG tunnel and running it on an OpenWRT router instead of a server means if the router is working, WG is working. Using Tasker on Android automatically brings the tunnel up whenever I leave my house and makes everything in my home instantly accessible no matter what I'm doing.

Another thing to consider is there's no corporation involved with WG use. So many companies have suddenly decided to start charging for "free for personal use" products and services, IMO it has made anything requiring an account worth avoiding.

I use OpenVPN. It’s pretty easy. You set it up with docker, download the client.ovpn file, then turn off port 80 (only needed for downloading that file). Now you can take that file and use it all of your devices to connect.

I use a mixture of tailscale and zerotier. Both are pretty powerful.

Tailscale. You can make a free account and they have clients for most things. If you want to self host, Headscale.

If your traffic is pretty low, rent a VPS for $5/month or whatever and set up a Wireguard server on it, have your devices maintain a connection to it (search keepalive for Wireguard), and set up HAProxy to do SNI-based routing for your various subdomains to the appropriate device.

Benefits:

• you control everything, so switching to a new provider is as simple as copying configs instead of reconfiguring everything
• most VPN companies only route traffic going out, not in; you can probably find one that does, but it probably costs more than the DIY option
• easy to share with others, just give a URL

Downsides:

• more complicated to configure
• bandwidth limitations

If you only need access on devices you control, something like Tailscale could work.

Benefits:

• very simple setup - Tailscale supports a ton of things
• potentially free, depending on your needs

Downsides:

• no public access, so you'd need to configure every device that wants to access it
• you don't control it, so if Tailscale goes evil, you'd need to change everything

I did the first and it works well.

I used wireguard self hosted for a bit but my work network is pretty locked down and I couldn't find a UDP port that wasn't blocked. How are you guys setting up wireguard in your home network? Or is it better to host it on a cloud VM?

I'm using tailscale right now because it punches through every firewall but I don't like using external providers and I'm worried it will eventually enshittify. I have a cloudflare domain but I can't really use any UDP port for my VPN as it's blocked.

Not running anything myself but am part of a self hosting discord that swears by Netbird because its basically Tailscale but with a bunch more ease of use features apparently

Run WireGuard on some home machine. (Does not need to be the machine the app you want to access is hosted on.)

Run WireGuard on your road warrior system.

There is no step 3.

I'm doing this right now from halfway around the world from my house and it's been great. Been using iPhone, iPad, and macOS clients connected to linuxserver/WireGuard docker container. Been doing this on many WiFi networks and 5G, no difference.

Wireguard with WG Tunnel on my phone so it automatically connects when I leave my WiFi. Some Apps excluded to use it like Android Auto because it doesn't work with an active vpn.

I rarely if ever see ZeroTier mentioned as a solution, but it's a self-hostable encrypted virtual mesh network (with a small free tier for corp-hosted), super secure, and really easy to setup. I use ZTnet instead of the free-tier corp-hosted controller

WireGuard is the fastest method, it’s free, there is no reason not to use it.

There's no magic bullet here. If you want good defense against bots you should use fail2ban and/or crowdsec. Geoblocking is also worth looking into. You will always have to open a port if you are selfhosting a VPN and will need to take aforementioned steps (or alternatives) to secure it. I believe Tailscale is a very good alternative for people who don't have time to do this as it does not (to the best of my knowledge) require you to expose a port.

I use Netbird (open source networking software from a German company) as it integrates well with Authentik and allows me to use the same SSO for VPN and most of my other services. Setting it up with Authentik and Nginx is a bit complicated but very well documented in my opinion. I do not have a positive experience of the official Android client but Jetbird is a nice alternative. Setting up DNS servers and network routes through peers is quite easy. Enrollment is also a breeze due to the Authentik integration.

Tailscale is easier than Wireguard but if you're running OPNsense or OpenWRT it's not hard to do a wireguard infra of your own and avoid having to use an outside service. I ended up having to revert to wireguard anyway because Tailscale's android app wasn't reliable on my new phone, it would drop out every few hours which messed up my monitor/alert system.

But Tailscale is still the easier of the two solutions.

Wireguard is the way to go. I like using wg-easy to use wireguard because its easy to set up in a docker container.

Zero tier. I went tailscale originally, and they're good, but their mdns support doesn't exist and several services rely on it. (For me, the showstopper was time machine backups)

In that case, wireguard. I only occasionally need to access a service that's not exposed to the internet, so I use ssh -L, but that would be quite inconvenient for your own use case.

I know tailscale exists but I've never used it, only tried wireguard on its own. Maybe there's some huge benefit to using it but wireguard worked fine for me.

Also a beginner here, I use Tailscale, and it's been a very easy setup!

Managing Wireguard is just one of Tailscale's features.

It uses some UDP black magic fuckery to get through NAT and firewalls without having to open ports on the edge. Very useful if you're behind CGNAT and/or your ISP is a dickhead and locks down the firewall on your router (this is why I use it; eat a dick, Vodafone). If the UDP fuckery is not available, it reverts to simple relay servers. The client can also advertise subnets and route to hosts on it. You could install the Tailscale client on OPNSense/pfSense/OpenWRT and access your entire home network through that one device.

Simple and fast solution is tailscale. tailscale is a business, but it works well

Personally i use opnsense and wireguard

1 pangolin 2 whatever is already on your router 3 wireguard

Pangolin also does RP with traefik so it's a win win

I’m in the same boat and currently run WireGuard to access my services. However the more I extend my stack of services, the more I have use-cases to expose certain services to friends and family. For that I’m currently looking into using Pangolin.