Any guides on how to host at home? I’m always afraid that opening ports in my home router means taking the heavy risk of being hacked. Does using something like CloudFlare help? I am a complete beginner.
Edit: Thanks for all the great response! They are very helpful.
As an addition to the options the others have given you, you could achieve a really secure setup with a VPN either on your home router, or on a Raspberry pi / VM / Container / Whatever using e.g. PiVPN. You would have to open a port on your router and forward it to the PiVPN. When logging into the pivpn, your device will behave just like you’re inside your home network (if you want it to). If you use wireguard and secure the machine with fail2ban you should be good. Wireguard uses UDP only, this means malicious packets coming to your VPN will simply be disregarded. This means the attacker won’t see / recognise any open ports at all. I did the same in the past and configured my raspberry pi to check if my IP has changed (global IPv6, b.c. my ISP doesn’t hand out native/routable IPv4 adresses) and then update a DNS entry pointing to my pi.