Is a Reverse Proxy the best self-hosted website protection option?

[FreeStream]

I host a few galleries with photos in for friends/family events using dockers on UnRAID, I currently just get the IP of the person who wants access to that gallery and add it to my firewall rules.

Clunky, but significantly limits the outside accessibility of the server. I personally use a Tailscale VPN to access my home network externally, but thats not user friendly.

I now want to implement this properly, perhaps via a Cloudflare based reverse proxy setup, ideally with some sort of 2FA, to still keep the server protected as much as possible. I have up to this point hosted my galleries via a normal web host, but anything above 100GB of space starts to become £££. I have 900/110 FTTP so I'd like to utilise the free 24/7 storage on my server instead...

Given I want to implement this properly, is cloud flare or similar the best option? Any other suggestions?

 

[ChrisD.]

Do you have a domain name? You'd need one for Cloudflare IIRC. Point it at your home IP address, and enable port 443 on your home firewall/router. Then put in a whitelist, only allowing Cloudflare IP addresses in.

 

[FreeStream]

Do you have a domain name? You'd need one for Cloudflare IIRC. Point it at your home IP address, and enable port 443 on your home firewall/router. Then put in a whitelist, only allowing Cloudflare IP addresses in.

Yes, this is the plan, but wanted to check to see if there was any better ideas

 

[ChrisD.]

Yes, this is the plan, but wanted to check to see if there was any better ideas

You could run your own reverse proxy, which if you’re streaming video you’d have to do as Cloudflare don’t allow that.

 

[FreeStream]

No, not streaming video.

Only complication I've come across is that I want to direct a subdomain to my locally hosted website not like it seems the other sites do point the domain to their IP and then generate CNAME entries, so currently, not working...!