[whiteandnerdy]

I host a Plex instance on a server on my home network, and struggled with setting up external access because my ISP at the time had a double NAT. What I ended up doing was renting a super cheap VPS from TINYKVM (https://tinykvm.com/) which I pay $15 a year for.

I point my DNS at the VPS, then I use the Zerotier VPN to tunnel traffic to my home server (Zerotier is embarrassingly easy to set up - I struggled for a while with OpenVPN but gave up). I use iptables packet forwarding to route traffic on port 443 or 80 from the VPS over the VPN to my local server, which is running an Nginx instance to serve the traffic.

This works perfectly for me 99% of the time. Main pain points have been the unreliability of hosting a server locally where Internet can die and power drop off, and a small amount of sysadmining on the VPS, which is so tiny that I have to be mindful of disk space (e.g. removing old Linux upgrade images every so often, etc). All told though, it works surprisingly seamlessly, and there's a certain smugness to knowing traffic from my smart TV goes all the way round the world and back through a VPN just to talk to my server sitting one foot below the TV.

[sdan]

Interesting setup. Have you heard of Cloudflare Argo by chance? Was thinking of using that, although this seems like a perfectly fine setup itself.