Hello I’ve been using cloudflare to get remote access for the couple apps I selfhost, but lately I’ve been hearing about the wonders of tailscale.
It seems that the free tier is enough for my use. Which would be a safe option to have remote access for my 3D printer? Also how are both in terms of privacy?
Well like… if you’d rather put your data in the hands of a company instead of your own when you could easily do the same thing yourself, why are you self hosting in the first place?
Just my two cents I’d prefer my traffic going through Cloudflare vs Tailscale if it’s all the same, since I’ve heard a lot about Tailscale but know nothing. I’ve interacted on Github threads with people from cloudflare and they’re all super nice and their blog posts and post-mortems are very insightful. Was curious to see if people had actual insight but appears it’s just auto cloudflare = bad.
That’s the beauty of Tailscale, you don’t have to trust them, because they don’t MITM your data, unlike with Cloudflare. I’m sure the employees of Cloudflare are nice, but so are the employees of any company, good or bad. It’s not that Cloudflare is necessarily bad, but you’re putting them in a position of trust over the content of your data you send through them, as opposed to trusting no one.
I’m sure most of the people who work for Google are very nice people, but people still switch to self hosting for the privacy and control over their own data, and the same goes for Cloudflare.
Got any info on how cloudflare MITM and decrypts all traffic but tailscale doesn’t? Playing devils advocate and pointing out how not much you’re saying is making sense.
EncryptKeeper’s explanation is perfectly concise and informative if you have a cursory grasp of self hosting and networking.
If it’s not making sense to you, I would suggest revisiting some of the technical fundamentals of self-hosting, which admittedly is quite an advanced topic that most people don’t, and do not need to care about.
You would be equally well-served, perhaps more so (if you don’t really care about privacy or terms of service) by sticking to regular cloud services. The road to self-hosting is arduous and if done wrongly, causes you more harm than good. Especially if your technical foundation is not yet strong. Which your posts suggest is the case.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply but my issue with their explanation is not in the concepts or how it operates but in the fact they stated that Cloudflare tunnels were not an option to choose despite proving they have no knowledge in how they are used or operate.