7 ms·

Cloudflare tunnels have been a blessing for me, as someone locked behind an apartments router trying to host services without the ability to forward ports. The

by rabuse 3y ago

Cloudflare tunnels have been a blessing for me, as someone locked behind an apartments router trying to host services without the ability to forward ports. The fact that it's free, is the cherry on top.

datenyan 3y ago
How have you found it for hosting services? I found it struggled with something as simple as an Apache webserver, though perhaps that's just something to do with my internet itself.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  My $5 is on the MTU mismatch.
  - geraldhh 3y ago
    the internet is not going to accept bigger packets just because someone wants to add vpn-encapsulation (additional data). you either account for the overhead (mssfix) or your payload gets fragmented and performance goes to shit, deal with it 8)
- InvaderFizz 3y ago
  I've had my Plex server behind Cloudflare Tunnels for years, never had any performance or reliability issues. Another great use case is for SSH to a server quite some distance away. I find that the latency when using a cloudflare tunnel to SSH on average better than whatever route my ISP would normally take.
  - Grimburger 3y ago
    > Plex server behind Cloudflare Tunnels for years Unless I'm missing something here, there's no way Cloudflare is allowing that much traffic through tunnels for free. Is this just setting up the initial plex connection through the tunnel and then going p2p?
    - detaro 3y ago
      > there's no way Cloudflare is allowing that much traffic through tunnels for free What's the limit?
    - InvaderFizz 3y ago
      Nope, 100% of my external users go through CF tunnels. The downside is that the caching results in the entire file being cached immediately if the user is not using transcoding, but most of my users are utilizing transcoding. I put a bandwidth limiter on my Cloudflare tunnel to limit it to 100Mbps I don't have any actual stats, but there appear to be about 10-20 hours a day of remote streaming, mostly at 3Mbps. So we're only looking at 400-800GB on average per month. Also, you can use Cloudflare unregistered free tunnels just like the article, but using registered tunnels makes it so you don't have to update the Plex url every time you reconnect. I used unregistered tunnels until Cloudflare made tunnels available on free tier accounts with no bandwidth charges.
    - _a9 3y ago
      Ive been using a tunnel to share my jellyfin server to friends for about a year. Its pretty much a proxy for it (add jellyfin:port to the config, start cloudflared, access on jellyfin.my.domain on cloudflare). I havent had any issues with bandwidth but it depends on how much you push through it. Ive seen stories throughout the years of people pushing 30-50TB before getting a temp ban from using cloudflare services. Of course DNS still works but you just cant use their proxy/cdn/tunnels/etc
- piperswe 3y ago
  I've pushed quite a lot of traffic over Tunnels with no issues - IME it performs just as well as sending the traffic over Cloudflare without the Tunnel.
pnpnp 3y ago
FWIW you can do the same thing with a cloud server & a couple bucks a month. I use AWS/t4g.nano reserved instance & WireGuard, and I think it runs me less than half a beer a month.
- entangledqubit 3y ago
  I started doing this a year ago and it's been super solid and low maintenance.
- discardedrefuse 3y ago
  If you're going to pay for AWS, might as well use Oracle's free tier. It is extremely generous. And you have to specifically change a setting to leave the free tier; So you it's not that easy to get accidentally billed for a misconfig. Yes, yes...I know..."ORACLE"!? choking sounds But at this point, they're no worse a company than Amazon. I've been very happy with their free tier for my home use. There's a bit of learning curve...just like AWS, but they give you a ton of free stuff, including training.
  - nulbyte 3y ago
    +1 for Oracle. Their free tier for compute is better than Google's: Up to four free ARM VMs and up to two AMD VMs.
    - matthewaveryusa 3y ago
      And the 10TB of free egress. Their proprietary stuff is very generous as well. Also 3000 emails/day -- really great offering tbh
  - metadat 3y ago
    Oracle OCI will randomly shut your instances down, which is super annoying. I stopped bothering to boot them back up again. Used to be a huge proponent, it was a good 4 years of freebies. But this too shall pass.
    - 3y ago

by rabuse 3y ago

datenyan 3y ago

How have you found it for hosting services? I found it struggled with something as simple as an Apache webserver, though perhaps that's just something to do with my internet itself.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
My $5 is on the MTU mismatch.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  the internet is not going to accept bigger packets just because someone wants to add vpn-encapsulation (additional data). you either account for the overhead (mssfix) or your payload gets fragmented and performance goes to shit, deal with it 8)
InvaderFizz 3y ago
I've had my Plex server behind Cloudflare Tunnels for years, never had any performance or reliability issues. Another great use case is for SSH to a server quite some distance away. I find that the latency when using a cloudflare tunnel to SSH on average better than whatever route my ISP would normally take.
- Grimburger 3y ago
  > Plex server behind Cloudflare Tunnels for years Unless I'm missing something here, there's no way Cloudflare is allowing that much traffic through tunnels for free. Is this just setting up the initial plex connection through the tunnel and then going p2p?
  - detaro 3y ago
    > there's no way Cloudflare is allowing that much traffic through tunnels for free What's the limit?
  - InvaderFizz 3y ago
    Nope, 100% of my external users go through CF tunnels. The downside is that the caching results in the entire file being cached immediately if the user is not using transcoding, but most of my users are utilizing transcoding. I put a bandwidth limiter on my Cloudflare tunnel to limit it to 100Mbps I don't have any actual stats, but there appear to be about 10-20 hours a day of remote streaming, mostly at 3Mbps. So we're only looking at 400-800GB on average per month. Also, you can use Cloudflare unregistered free tunnels just like the article, but using registered tunnels makes it so you don't have to update the Plex url every time you reconnect. I used unregistered tunnels until Cloudflare made tunnels available on free tier accounts with no bandwidth charges.
  - _a9 3y ago
    Ive been using a tunnel to share my jellyfin server to friends for about a year. Its pretty much a proxy for it (add jellyfin:port to the config, start cloudflared, access on jellyfin.my.domain on cloudflare). I havent had any issues with bandwidth but it depends on how much you push through it. Ive seen stories throughout the years of people pushing 30-50TB before getting a temp ban from using cloudflare services. Of course DNS still works but you just cant use their proxy/cdn/tunnels/etc
piperswe 3y ago
I've pushed quite a lot of traffic over Tunnels with no issues - IME it performs just as well as sending the traffic over Cloudflare without the Tunnel.

pnpnp 3y ago

FWIW you can do the same thing with a cloud server & a couple bucks a month. I use AWS/t4g.nano reserved instance & WireGuard, and I think it runs me less than half a beer a month.

entangledqubit 3y ago
I started doing this a year ago and it's been super solid and low maintenance.
discardedrefuse 3y ago
If you're going to pay for AWS, might as well use Oracle's free tier. It is extremely generous. And you have to specifically change a setting to leave the free tier; So you it's not that easy to get accidentally billed for a misconfig. Yes, yes...I know..."ORACLE"!? choking sounds But at this point, they're no worse a company than Amazon. I've been very happy with their free tier for my home use. There's a bit of learning curve...just like AWS, but they give you a ton of free stuff, including training.
- nulbyte 3y ago
  +1 for Oracle. Their free tier for compute is better than Google's: Up to four free ARM VMs and up to two AMD VMs.
  - matthewaveryusa 3y ago
    And the 10TB of free egress. Their proprietary stuff is very generous as well. Also 3000 emails/day -- really great offering tbh
- metadat 3y ago
  Oracle OCI will randomly shut your instances down, which is super annoying. I stopped bothering to boot them back up again. Used to be a huge proponent, it was a good 4 years of freebies. But this too shall pass.
  - 3y ago