You're comparing apples and oranges, reverse proxy and VPN serve two different purposes.

May I ask what do you guys have exposed to the internet?

I personally just have a wireguard VPN (single UDP port open) and everything is accessible through an internal reverse proxy. I just never felt the need to expose nothing ant least not web related.

VPN because I don't know enough about all the random arrr services to expose them trustworthily.

Both. Some things are only resolvable internally or over wireguard. Some things are publicly accessible via a reverse proxy.

Overseerr, bitwarden, plex all have ports open or through the reverse proxy. Same with email and a few other services. All the *arrs are accessible only on my network or over VPN.

Tailscale with reverse proxy, nothing publicly exposed

Reverse proxy and allowing connection only to IPs from my country.

I've got a reverse proxy for stuff I want to be able to hit from the outside. It's behind an SSO portal with 2fa (hardware token). Then for everything else I VPN in.

Probably the usual. 80/443, wireguard, a couple game servers.

For those of you who staunchly put your open ports on a VPS and wireguard tunnel it back to your home server, are you firewalling that wg connection to only allow specific traffic?

Wireguard, as only a handful of people need access to the services, I manage it manually - and not with Tailscale or something similar.

With that my server looks nothing like a server from the outside, as I'm exposing nothing - Wireguard doesn't even show up in a port scan

A reverse proxy isn't a substitute for a VPN for access outside your network. And it isn't any less secure; you only need to open 1 port however all of your services will be accessible via that single port which is arguably less secure.

Currently I expose port 22 for SSH, 443 for Nginx and a couple extra for Syncthing (to mirror my media files between a Hetzner Storage Box and my NAS at home).
There's a specific setup I tried to build once but didn't manage:

• Expose only Wireguard port from my VPS
• make it so that when (and only when) a device is connected to the VPS via Wireguard, then mydomain.xyz will target the VPS' IP (and therefore hit my Nginx proxy which redirects to my various services at myservices.mydomain.xyz.

I tried by having a Adguard Home running on that same VPS, and setting its IP as the DNS in the wg0.conf that goes on the client device but it didn't work.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

[Thread #60 for this sub, first seen 18th Aug 2023, 07:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Caddy Reverse Proxy with Basic Auth for services which are critical like my 3d printer. Without auth for other services like my website or jellyfin and such. I use docker for everything so that's another layer of safety for me.

I have port 443 open and use subdomains for most stuff. Some other ports for non-HTTP services but I don't have any right now.

I use a self-hosted vpn, because I don't want to expose anything to the internet. The ones I do want to, I haven't set up yet since it would require reinstalling my pi. But I do have a reverse proxy set up on a vps that I will use once I get around to doing it.

Depending on the services you provide, the usual standard ports. So if you run http/https services, port 80 and 443 respectively.

You seem to answer your own question.

Anything that is exposed is done through nginx proxy manager and 2FA is enforced on those apps either through the app or through Authelia.

Some of the exposed apps are shared with friends and family so easier to expose securely than mess with VPN for them.

Anything else is only accessible via VPN on my router.

I need to look at tailscale.

Never open ports to the internet unless you want everybody to see it. Always use VPN to access your selfhosted stuff. If you've got a lot of VPN connections to set up, try generating a QR code for the connection. Makes it a bit faster to setup the client.

I never open any ports to the open Internet other than the two my friend client uses.

For remote access I use a P2P VPN called ZeroTier leaving it always running on the Pi, and switching it on for the remote device when needed. It's free for up to like 50 users and is very powerful, but dead simple.

I use Wireguard for everything except a couple of ports that are open directly to Internet for Traccar (fleet management) because the GPS trackers don't support anything in the middle and I use Cloudflare Zero trust tunnel for Nextcloud (without any other security layer because the Android and Windows app don't support them) because my family use it too. The Wireguard tunnel is always on both on my PCs and on my Android smartphone.

I have two nginx ingress running on my cluster. One of private one public. Public one is what's exposed on 80 and 443 to the net.

The private is only available via VPN or lan. The public is for services I want internet exposed.

My family have a VPN network set up to my lan on their router and have access to most services but the public stuff is for the internet friends