Ways to Expose Services Publicly

I want to expose my services publicly on my own domain name, how would you guys do that?

I have seen people using Cloudflare, but I don’t want to use Cloudflare out of principle. I have also seen stuff on caddy and frp that I’ve done some rough researching.

What do you guys do?

I recently switched to Netbird on a VPS (on Vultr). Their reverse proxy is super easy to set up / self host. They also offer a free version that works pretty good too, I just wanted to make it difficult for myself (thats the whole point of self hosting, right? )

I have seen netbird pop around every now and again. I might try out their cloud free version first and if I like it I might try self hosting it.

So you host netbird on a vps you rent and that is used for reverse proxy? So with that reverse proxy I can have my home server be publicly accessible and I can have friends log in to my jellyfin server without having to connect to my tailnet.

My last concern is security. How is this set up good for making sure I don’t just get constantly botted and exploited?

You're probably misunderstanding what netbird does (unless I'm the one misunderstanding things?).

Netbird subnet is equivalent to a tailscale tailnet (for all practical purposes; they even both use wireguard and hole-punching underneath). Netbird is not a reverse proxy (which I feel is what you think based on your comment).

While Netbird is generally just one of the many alternatives to Tailscale, they also do have a Reverse Proxy feature that allows access without a Netbird client. Haven’t tested it yet, seems to be in beta.

docs.netbird.io/manage/reverse-proxy