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If you have a UniFi gateway, you can enable region based firewall on your port forward ip. This then blocks most of the world (incoming) as a first step. Then like others suggest, a reverse proxy. I use Caddy built with the Maxmind geolocation plugin, and I also run fail2ban on my exposed service.
I figure if you don’t need most of the world accessing your services, it is best to exclude them
I can't answer your question as I haven't taken that step yet, everything is still confined to my LAN.
Here's a similar thread from last month that had a lot of replies. Hopefully will be some useful info there for you. Good luck!
Is the server at your house? Or VPS?
My server is at home
The way that I handled this, was to get a $5 VPS, and have it proxy all my traffic over wireguard. Your DNS records (and SSL cert) all point to the VPS public IP address. IPtables rules route all relevant traffic.
I use traefik combined with crowdsec, there is a plugin for that. There is some pretty good tutorial (in german) on goneuland.de
I have a Flint 2 with a vanilla install of openWRT, that hosts wireguard. I have 2 static IPs, because I thought hey running my own mail and smtp services cannot be that hard (turns out yes it is hard and not worth the time to deal). Any who I have Wireguard running on my firewall and Caddy running on one of my pi’s, it gets TLS from lets encrypt.
I have a couple of domains that Caddy uses to point things out to the world or my LAN/vLANs/VPNs. Very few of the things go out to the whole world, but if I wanted to share say a Jellyfin server with someone I could wip up a VPN that only allows Jellyfin through and points DNS to my piholes. Why do I mention my ad blocker? I mention pihole because that what hosts the A records to my domain names that Caddy can serve up, I do not remember why I set it up like this, I would have to look through my notes but pihole points “service”.domain1or2.xyz to caddy which than points to the right service.
Edit: went and looked A records are hosted on pihole for my LAN/vLANs/VPNs to prevent things needing to go out and come back just to tell devices where on my LAN services are.
Netbird has a reverseproxy that's super easy to setup to point to one of your netbird nodes.
You may also want to consider a hardened single sign-on solution, as that can enable 2FA for all your services, even those that don't have them built-in. I use Authentik.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CA | (SSL) Certificate Authority |
| CSAM | Child Sexual Abuse Material |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 24 acronyms.
[Thread #74 for this comm, first seen 6th Aug 2026, 09:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]