this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Selfhosted

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Cloudflare Tunnel? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by WhosMansIsThis@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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!

EDIT: yall are great! Thank you so much for the replies. I'm going try my luck with pangolin but its good to know I have options.

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[–] aaravchen@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Serious limits on Cloudflare Tunnels:

  1. Only works if you use Cloudflare as your domain registrar for that domain
  2. You can't use it for anything high bandwidth, specifically including streaming media (e.g. Plex/Jellyfin)
  3. They reserve the right to terminate your service tunnel randomly at any time without warning for any/no reason unless you pay them for the service.

And that doesnt address the issue of getting in bed with Cloudflare (which has its own ethical ramifications).

I'd recommend one of the alternatives like localxpose.io that offer the same thing but without the limitations. Or you can slap together your own with a wireguard tunnel to a minuscule VPS with some routing rules on it. Both are about €5/month, which is cheaper (the same?) as paying for Cloudflare Tunnel to avoid the random termination and vendor lock in.

[–] billhead@sh.itjust.works 6 points 10 months ago

Regarding #1, you have to use Cloudflare for DNS but it doesn't matter if they are your domain registrar or not.

[–] sirboozebum@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I heard you can use Pangolin and self host your own tunnel.

Haven't looked into it.

[–] aaravchen@lemmy.zip 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hosting the tunnel is the only real value add from these services, which is why I'm confused by Pangolin's business model.

[–] sirboozebum@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

It is strange.

The only reason people who use Pangolin is to have control over the tunnel rather than rely on a company.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

For #3 every service will say something like that, even with paid accounts.

[–] aaravchen@lemmy.zip 1 points 10 months ago

To some extent. Cloudflare is extremely explicit about it for their free service though, and they do actively exercise the option if they think you're getting too much benefit from it.