Cloudflare Tunnel

Long-term owners

I've been running a couple of websites on a home machine behind a Cloudflare tunnel for 2-3 years now.

Sep 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• Tailscale FunnelLets you expose a service on your tailnet to the public internet with simple setup, free HTTPS endpoints and stable performance. Main caveat: it is public only, with no auth.20recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 167 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Tunnels are basically a cheat code. Being able to expose services securely to the internet without opening a single inbound port on the firewall feels like magic.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Ask HN: Why people still use GCP and AWS?”

2. Cloudflare tunnels are pretty cool. Do you segregate your server from your home domain too? Little weird having cloudflared on my home network.

   Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day”

3. I like Cloudflare Tunnels a lot, but something that annoys me is that officially you're not allowed to use them for streaming video

   Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels”

4. There's also Cloudflare tunnels for stuff that you want to be available to the internet but dont want to open ports

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “2026 is the Year of Self-hosting”

5. these are a great solution to accessing home-network resources without punching holes / port-forwarding

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Ring owners are returning their cameras”

6. it's pretty much a couple clicks and typing in a subdomain name once cloudflared is running on a server

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels”

7. I've been running a couple of websites on a home machine behind a Cloudflare tunnel for 2-3 years now.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels”

8. gives you a bunch of other DDoS and abuse protection and keeps your app server off the public Internet

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “FastCGI: 30 Years Old and Still the Better Protocol for Reverse Proxies”

9. With Coolify and Cloudflare Tunnels you can self host your personal projects even behind CG-NAT.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Ask HN: What should I do with my old laptop in 2026?”

10. It's a magical invention that lets us host websites while keeping our server firewalls closed!

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Ask HN: Why people still use GCP and AWS?”

11. You can even go completely free with Cloudflare tunnel with your own office/home hardware.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month”

12. I would highly recommend not putting your home network at risk and poking holes into it.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Hosting a Site on a Raspberry Pi”

13. one can use tailscale or cloudflare tunnels to expose the server even if its behind nat

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “2026 is the Year of Self-hosting”

14. Cloudflare can also help achieve this without too much fuss for self-hosted projects

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero”

15. you can expose it via a cloudflare tunnel, meanwhile it's behind your firewall + NAT

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Google is dead. Where do we go now?”

16. You'd be amazed by how far you can get with a home linux box and cloudflare tunnels.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars”

17. The nice thing about using cloudflare tunnel, is theres zero ports to expose, ever.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero”

18. Cloudflare Tunnels + Zero Trust + Github SSO means securing them is rather easy

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?”

19. you're probably better off with Cloudflare tunnel and using it as a home server

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers”

20. It's also completely free, all you need is a domain name managed by cloudflare

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Show HN: Port Zero – how I learned to stop worrying and love PORT=0”

21. Home IP is never exposed either, because it's proxied through the cf tunnel.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

22. very useful if you want to ingest mail on a local server without a public IP

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels”

23. replaced my $20/mo Kubernetes Load Balancer with a free Cloudflare Tunnel

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Stop Paying for Kubernetes Load Balancers: Use Cloudflare Tunnel Instead”

24. Then, all the filtering and access control happens outside of my network

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “I exposed my Homelab through Cloudflare Tunnels”

25. big tech having a backdoor into your local network, having your ssl private key, and dictating the terms and conditions

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Show HN: s@: decentralized social networking over static sites”

26. I was not too comfortable with it. As I understand it it is a reverse tunnel from your internal network to cloudflare?

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month”

27. I find it a bit funny when people self host to get away from cloud and then use Cloudflare tunnels

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day”

28. Then you're not limited by CF Tunnel's rules like the upload limits or not being able to use Plex.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “My Homelab Setup”

29. you should not use Cloudflare Tunnels to stream media. This is forbidden by their terms of service

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “State of Homelab 2026”

30. Cloudflare Tunnel blocks requests above 100MiB, which makes it impossible to upload long videos

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

31. Tunnels go through Cloudflare infrastructure so are subject to bandwidth limits (100MB upload).

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “My Homelab Setup”

32. CF tunnels will ban your account if you used it to watch a movie due to DMCA/copyrights.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day”

33. I’ve been using cloudflare tunnels quite a bit in places where I would have traditionally gone for a reverse port forward and they’re working really well.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels”

34. Or even better, _just a little_ cloud involved if you expose through Cloudflare tunnel for just you and whoever else needs to access it.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Ring owners are returning their cameras”

35. running it locally and exposing it with a Cloudflare Tunnel or Ngrok is probably the path of least resistance

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds”

36. Something like a Cloudflare+tunnel on one side, tailscale or something to get into it on the other.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero”

37. This still works great for a demo instead of a product pitch, to send an link out to see something.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels”

38. I use their arbitrary TCP tunneling feature to tunnel SSH for a remote host, which works great.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “State of Homelab 2026”

39. the two features that push me towards cloudflared is the custom domains and client-less access

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels”

40. some sort of zero trust solution actively maintained by one of them seems like the right path

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime”