I currently have my Plex server open to the world. I realise that's probably not best practice, so I'm trying to find a solution that can work for me.
I've been looking at cloudflare tunnels and it seems like thats probably what I want. Giving me access to my home server from outside. And it's free, which is a nice perk
I've noticed however that the terms of service don't allow for video streaming, but is allowed in the paid tier. Before I commit to spending money, I'm curious if it's even technically possible. Plex tends to phone home to allow users to authenticate and locate their servers, so is that possible through tunnels?
Is this a waste of time? Is there a better solution? How are others dealing with this problem?
...Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service...
If you want a free solution, wireguard and tailscale are your friends. It you're willing to pay, get a cheap VPS (the one I use for this is from RackNerd for ~$12/yr). It'll make the process very user friendly if you're planning to share it with others.
My understanding is that cloudflare will block you from doing this if/when they detect you doing it, someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Off the top of my head, would a tailscale funnel work for what you want? Serving Plex to the Internet without port forwarding?
Actually with Plex, I'm not sure you even need to expose it at all. People can reach your server via the Plex app as long as it's connected to Plex servers, they don't need to reach the site actually hosted on your hardware
Yes, there's the one open port that is required. Otherwise your traffic gets routed through Plex servers and the streams are limited to pretty poor quality video
I really should look into these cloudflare tunnels people keep speaking of. A simple enough solution is to host a VPN server of your choice with cert and pass and it'll make it pretty well impossible to reach by anyone without the required creds.