A reverse proxy solves another problrm, doesn’t it? In any case it requires one of the solutions I mentioned to make your stuff accessible from outside.

Additionally, is a self hosted server only accessible inside my home? What about accessing the services outside, like Bitwarden or Nextcloud apps that require syncing and availability of data wherever I am? If it is useless outside, there would be no point for me personally to self host in the first place since I am perfectly fine with using cloud services for now and the convenience that comes with it. Plus, no one else in my family cares about self hosting and I don’t wish to spend the effort to convince them to in vain, so setting up a server for convenience of everyone at home is also out of the question.

It is only accessible from your local network (if it is there in the first place, you can always selfhost on rented virtual private server), until you make it accessible. There a different ways to achieve that:

• Wireguard tunnel
• cloudflare tunnel
• (reverse) ssh tunnel
• dynDNS
• opening ports on your router

Which is the way for you depends on the circumstances, how your ISP connects you to the internet mainly

I use reverse ssh tunnels, technically running on my home server. For each service i want to expose on the internet, i have a systemd-unit which handles a said reverse tunnel to the vps. Basically, the port running the service locally gets tunneled to a port on the vps, that happens via ssh, so reasonably secure (login as root disabled, login with password disabled, with a special user with little to no rights running the systemd service locally and remotely to log in via ssh). On the remote vps, there is a reverse proxy running, nginx, which works like the service would be running on the remote vps, really. There are some services actually running there, a mail server for example. The config files aren’t really different, everything nginx handles gets passed to a localhost port. A nginx instance is also running on the local home server to serve all the local services and the global ones locally, and the dns on my main router resolves the adresses of the global services to the local ones. SSL-Certificates are acquired by the remote vps and copied to the local home server, so that the end users don’t have any difference in their ux regardless if they are in the local network or somewhere outside.

Edit: I mostly use this approach because my ISP uses dualStack lite and I could not access anything local from outside with any other technique. But I like it, it is really basic.

Thanks, i do already know the lounge, but I self host quassel and have my own self hosted image sharing solution.

Oh well, there are different implementations of IRC, and some limit you more than others. Flood protection is a pita if you want to share long text, since max message length is not that much. Netsplits are still a thing and your nick can’t be longer than 15 chars. Text formatting works on most servers, but that’s no guarantee. The length of a channel topic is also limited. You interact with the server only through the same messages you send to your chats. You need some kind of bouncer to still follow a chat if offline.

I host my own tunnels on a vps, and i indeed use one tunnel for every app. There are only 3, so no big deal, but I wanted to make sure to expose only what I want to be exposed, as I have some more services running in my local network only.

I’m in a irc channel with a bunch of internet friends. I like how ancient it is, it reminds me of the old internet. The limitations are severe however and I would never suggest to anyone to use IRC as a text chat server. Without these people and the nostalgia I would go for matrix I think.