What makes you think you shouldn't? Basically all the ways of exposing a service running in your house boil down to "port forwarding" in one way or another. Yo

What makes you think you shouldn't? Basically all the ways of exposing a service running in your house boil down to "port forwarding" in one way or another. You can use a cloud service (or a cloud server you run) to forward the traffic. The only relevant factors, as far as I can figure, are: 1. If you port forward on your router, you're exposing your home IP to folks who access your service. That may or may not be something you're OK with 2. You have to keep any DNS or hardcoded IPs up to date if your home IP changes. Pretty doable via a number of different methods, with varying lag time depending on how you do it. 3. Somebody who finds a vulnerability in the service you're running have a foot in the door to your home LAN. But that's a factor with "making home services available on the internet", not specifically with port forwarding on your router. The thing that I would say is a bad idea is what many routers refer to as "DMZ" mode or similar, where you broadly send incoming connections to a system. That's got a lot more risk since you have to be a lot more cautious about what services are listening on your server.