Selfhosted

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

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 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

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.

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

Tailscale is great in that config is super simple. Downsides tailscale ssh has to be called at launch if you want ssh access over that network... Could be a benefit for security...however its a tailscale specific ssh and not everything is available.
Data servers moved to the USA a few ears back.

Wireguard is more setup, but a better (self host option ). There is also Headscale if you want to selfhost a tailscale type server

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)

I run pfsense as my router on a small form factor PC with two Ethernet cards. I run Wireguard which is pretty easy to setup in pfsense. I have the client installed on my PC at work and my mobile devices. I'm never more than a click from being connected to my home network.

In the past I used ssh tunnels with port forwards to the services I wanted to access remotely.

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

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.

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 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.

I do have both (VPN and Reverse Proxy) running. For VPN my router uses Wireguard and at work we use Wireguard as well. You can alter the config in such a way, that only internal traffic would get routed through your VPN. I love this, because for regular traffic, I'm not bound to the upload at my home network or with work, route my personal traffic through the company internet or lose access to my own network.

Reverse proxy isn't bad either. I have a DNS running at home, that redirects my domain used for home stuff, directly to the reverse proxy. This way I can block certain stuff, I want a fancy domain but not be accessed from the outside, because its not needed or not set up properly.

With a VPN, you would be more secure, because its a single instance you need to keep safe. With regular updates and set up properly, this shouldn't be an issue. But I would suggest reading tech news portals, that do cover security breaches of well known software.

With a reverse proxy setup I use, I must trust so many things. I must trust my reverse proxy with the firewall and then each server I run.

But keep one thing in mind. If you for example use stuff like Home Assistant, that you access in the background, it wouldn't work if you connect via a VPN. With Wireguard I can be connected 24/7 to my VPN, even at home. With the previous VPN my router used (I guess it was OpenVPN), this wasn't possible.

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

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.

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.

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.

My Asus router has a a few nice ones