My current setup is that I have a home server running a number of services that are only accessible to myself on my local network (Jellyfin, Home Assistant, etc.) and a DigitalOcean droplet I rent that runs a number of public facing items (personal websites). I’ve been looking into running my own Matrix server for myself and some friends, but while it will be public facing, I would prefer to run it on my own hardware for cost and storage reasons.
I have gotten it up and running the “old fashioned way”, by pointing my domain at my home network, setting up port forwarding and a reverse proxy. Is this the recommended solution? I have heard vague references made to somehow using a VPS service to forward specific traffic to a home server via WireGuard. I’m not sure how this is done, or really what the benefits are, so I was curious if anyone had any advice.
One of the main reasons to do this is if you are behind CGNAT and cannot port-forward. However, giving out your home IP isn’t ideal regardless. If you decide to not use a VPS as a reverse proxy, then you might want to look into using cloudflares proxy, which hides your IP and also serves your content more efficiently. However, I’m not quite familiar on how matrix works so this might not be possible if you need ports other than 80 and 443 as all other ports are not forwarded by the cloudflare proxy.