You make a good point about a potential pitfall of self-hosting things. I'll mention though that if you are self-hosting for just yourself (or some small number

You make a good point about a potential pitfall of self-hosting things. I'll mention though that if you are self-hosting for just yourself (or some small number of people), you can set up a VPN connection for secure access to your private network, which eliminates the need to open ports to the public internet at all. Other than the VPN of course. Not that you should necessarily rely solely on the VPN for your security, but it helps.