

What sounds like gatekeeping is often a strongly worded emphasis on having the prerequisite knowledge to not just host your services, but do it in a way that is secure, resilient, and responsible. If you don’t know how to set up a network, set up a resilient storage, manage your backups, set up HTTPS and other encryption solutions, manage user authentication and privileges, and expose your services securely, you should not be self-hosting. You should be learning how to self-host responsibly. That applies to everything from Debian to Synology.
Friends don’t let friends expose their networks like Nintendo advises.




It’s possible that, when the ISP revokes the public address and assigns a new one, the DNS record isn’t updated immediately and still points to the old address. Then every new request would be sent to the old, invalid address.
And this is where I start shilling for Tailscale. It’s a Wireguard-based mesh VPN that is designed to work from behind firewalls, NAT, and CGNAT. It has its own internal split DNS provider, and probably some mechanism to handle public address changes that is transparent to the tunnelled traffic. You can use it to share the server with only the devices that have the client installed, or expose the server to the internet.
I’ve got it set up on my OPNSense firewall as a subnet router that advertises the subnet where my servers are, and often stream from Jellyfin over it. There’s some overhead, but it’s never been disruptive.