Hey,
I am currently paying 5,50€ a month for a Hetzner VPS to selfhost a Pangolin instance. I’ve come to quite rely on Pangolin, because I have to access all of my selfhosted services from my home server from remote. That’s because I have to keep my server at home (while I live in a student dorm, which doesn’t allow using their network to host servers). Also their authentication and private resources are really good for security and exposing ssh and other stuff from my home server to authenticated clients.
Anyway, I like this setup, because it is fully FOSS and I have 100% control of what my VPS does. It is really expensive though and I am trying to reduce my monthly expenses right now.
I saw online, that you can get a free managed instance of Pangolin on their website (https://pangolin.net/pricing Cloud). It would meet all my needs, but I wouldn’t be 1. Fully FOSS (because they probably run the business licensed version of their software) and 2. I wouldn’t have full control.
These services work by managing all the https certs themselves, so the have to decrypt all their traffic and send it through the tunnel to your server. Theoretically, Pangolin could log all my traffic to and from my server, which would be a huge privacy risk. But probably they’re not, because that would be really impractical…? I don’t know.
Do you think, it would be worth the privacy tradeoff for the cost savings?
Yeah install a reverse proxy at home and reach it through a service like Netbird or Tailscale. No VPS needed. And it’s probably a better idea to do it this way because a local reverse proxy would be 100% self-reliant. Hosting Pangolin on VPS would always make you dependent on the VPS.
NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager) is an Nginx distribution with a friendly UI and it includes certbot so you can get/renew certs automatically and use
https://service.yourdomain.com/URLs if you want.You will need a DNS provider for that btw, DeSEC.io is free and committed to privacy.