this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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I'm using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I'm using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?

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[–] ptz@dubvee.org 23 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (32 children)

I have never used it, so take this with a grain of salt, but last I read, with the free tier, you could not secure traffic between yourself and Cloudflare with your own certs which implies they can decrypt and read that traffic. What, if anything, they do with that capability I do not know. I just do not trust my hosted assets to be secured with certs/keys I do not control.

There are other things CF can do (bot detection, DDoS protection, etc), but if you just want to avoid exposing your home IP, a cheap VPS running Nginx can work the same way as a CF tunnel. Setup Wireguard on the VPS and have your backend servers in Nginx connect to your home assets via that. If the VPS is the "server" side of the WG tunnel, you don't have to open any local ports in your router at all. I've been doing that, originally with OpenVPN, since before CF tunnels were ever offered as a service.

Edit: You don't even need WG, really. If you setup a persistent SSH tunnel and forward / bind a port to your VPS, you can tunnel the traffic over that.

[–] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 4 points 2 weeks ago (16 children)

I have the same setup but using frp which stands for fast reverse proxy.

The term VPN is pure marketing bs. What is called VPN today used to be called Proxy Server.

I've also heard good things about using Pangolin for the same setup.

[–] rexbron@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 weeks ago

Good luck I’m behind nine proxies!

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