Hello everyone, I would need some advice on my setup.
I had an ISP with basic DSL 60/20Mbps and I was hosting my services at home with SWAG as a main proxy, opening the ports. I ordered 2 days ago a plan with a new ISP for a 1Gbps line, that offered port forwarding as well. The installation was done today and it turns out they retired the port forwarding on my offer yesterday.
I can see potentially 3 choices:
- stay with the old ISP and the slow-ish line. My main issue was the uplink speed that made off-site backup a pain
- go with the new ISP but order the higher speed plan that is £25/month more expensive, and without a proper guarantee that they will keep offering the port forwarding
- use the non-port forwarding option, but rent a small VPS that would act as a front-end (through zerotier/tailscale/direct wireguard), paying a small latency cost when accessing remotely.
I am not fully sure about the pros and cons of the different ways on the last option. I would be kin on keeping my home server fully capable, the point of me self-hosting being to cope with temporary disconnection at home. But then you can either have an IP table routing in the VPS to forward everything on the used port, or have another nginx proxy there to redirect everything. And I am not fully sure VPS providers are generally OK with this kind of use.
Has anyone got a similar setup to option 3 and would have some advices?
Edit 1: Thanks a lot for your comments everyone!
I got a small VPS (not the cheapest one yet) and setup a wireguard tunnel following this principle and it seems to be working so far. I’ll monitor a bit the situation as I have 14 days to cancel my plan. I’ll also see how it works for gitea running in docker in the NAT and ssh forwarding, I suspect this will be a fun endeavour.
I decided to avoid using cloudflare tunnel. And I am avoiding using a nginx proxy at the moment as I would need to ensure the certificates are properly synced between the two (or maybe letsencrypt allows you to have two certificates for the same domain?)
Having your ISP do your port forwarding seems alien to me as that’s not the norm where I am. Since it seems like a standard thing where you are, you may run the risk of another ISP doing the same thing. Personally, if the price is right, I’d take the latency hit and get a VPS and route all inbound traffic through that via wireguard.
Slap CloudFlare tunnel in front of your web services and call it a quits?
I would cancel the new ISP on principal. Fool me once shame on you, if they fool me twice it’s on me. I wouldn’t give them the opportunity to fuck me again.
Indeed, the way they did that makes me quite angry. But at the same time, that’s 1Gbps vs 20Mbps upload, and I was struggling with the limitation when working from home sometimes. The one one is also cheaper so if the tunneling option works without too much pain, I’d be willing to give it a go.
I have TMobile internet so port forwarding as far as I can tell is not possible unless I go with a business plan and in my experience cloudflare tunnels are extremely slow
A couple thoughts for you. I have a wonderful local fiber ISP and when I got hooked up, I discovered they were doing CG-NAT on residential connections. I called up and asked if I could have a public IP to host services and they just immediately gave me one. Definitely not the stereotypical ISP interaction, but if you haven’t already tried asking politely, it might be worth a shot.
On the last item, yes, letsencrypt lets you get certs for the same domain from multiple hosts, but I’ll often use a self-signed cert on the host and then get the public-facing cert at the reverse proxy level. No need to coordinate copying certs over in most cases.
What’s the ISP? Is it one of those ISPs that do CG-NAT by chance?
It seems weird that port forwarding is even considered to be a feature on the ISP side, that’s usually a router thing.
Any chance you could run your own router? Because as long as your router can connect to the ISP, and get a public IP from it, there’s not much the ISP can do unless they have firewalls or a NAT system.
The only situation that makes sense to not do port forwarding is those CG-NAT ISPs and carriers.
Otherwise, yeah, you can get the smallest possible VPS possible (some can be obtained for $3-$5/mo) and you can just VPN your stuff home pretty easily.
I have about 25 letsencrypt certificates on the same domain, so that is definitely not an issue.
If your self-served stuff is just for you or family, I use tailscale for that. Nothing publicly enabled, have to be in the tailscale net to access.
The last option. VPS are freaking fast, and if you have Gbps at home, that should be plenty fast.
I have a setup for option 3 almost exactly as you describe, using Wireguard to connect the servers to the vps and Nginx on the vps to redirect everything. I dont have any noticable latancy, although I do not run anything that relies on realtime interaction, so ymmv.
Do you have IPv6? Just let your service’s IP/port through the firewall.
(If you have no IPv6 but CGNAT, the ISP is bad…)
So it sounds to me like you may have to deal with a IPv4 only address behind CGNAT, which makes port forwarding not work anymore. It’s how my connection is set up, but luckily it does fully support IPv6 and that doesn’t require any forwarding so I make do.
If IPv6 isn’t an option for you or you’d like to access your services from IPv4 only networks, I’d just go with Tailscale myself. I’ve been a happy user for years and it just works so well, should be good in your situation as well.Do they not offer an opt-out of CG-NAT? or a surcharge for a static IP?
No dedicated opt-out offered, but I can migrate to the 3Gbps plan that is not using CG-NAT (for now…) But that is £25/month more expensive. That’s a nice VPS.
I think 25 euro more for a 3gig non-cgnat plan is worth it. But I’m Australian and paying $150aud per month for 1000/50 (or $200 for 250/100 if i wanted) so I’m not the best judge of value. I’ve been long propagandised into thinking decent internet is a luxury for large tech corporations only.
Just use a cloudflare tunnel. It’s free and can be used on pretty much any network that sends and receives data.
I second this. cloudflare tunnels are nice and convenient af. Fine even if you don’t have a static IP, as long as you’re keeping configs server-side.
Your ISP gives you 1Gbps but doesn’t give you your own IP so you need port forwarding?
Yes exactly
I’m assuming CGNAT is the problem here? Interesting that they ever even offered a port-forwarding option since that’d be the first time I have heard of that.
Have you considered keeping both plans? You said it was a different isp - dsl and fiber use different cables is it may be possible. Depending on what youre after, this may be a fun project for tying two lines together.
I did consider it, and I have not cancelled the old one yet. But that becomes more expensive than migrating to the higher end plan without CG NAt of the provider.
