ISP not offering port forwarding anymore

Hello everyone, I would need some advice on my setup.

I had an ISP with basic DSL 60/20Mbps and I was hosting my services at home with SWAG as a main proxy, opening the ports. I ordered 2 days ago a plan with a new ISP for a 1Gbps line, that offered port forwarding as well. The installation was done today and it turns out they retired the port forwarding on my offer yesterday.

I can see potentially 3 choices:

  1. stay with the old ISP and the slow-ish line. My main issue was the uplink speed that made off-site backup a pain
  2. go with the new ISP but order the higher speed plan that is £25/month more expensive, and without a proper guarantee that they will keep offering the port forwarding
  3. use the non-port forwarding option, but rent a small VPS that would act as a front-end (through zerotier/tailscale/direct wireguard), paying a small latency cost when accessing remotely.

I am not fully sure about the pros and cons of the different ways on the last option. I would be kin on keeping my home server fully capable, the point of me self-hosting being to cope with temporary disconnection at home. But then you can either have an IP table routing in the VPS to forward everything on the used port, or have another nginx proxy there to redirect everything. And I am not fully sure VPS providers are generally OK with this kind of use.

Has anyone got a similar setup to option 3 and would have some advices?

Edit 1: Thanks a lot for your comments everyone!

I got a small VPS (not the cheapest one yet) and setup a wireguard tunnel following this principle and it seems to be working so far. I'll monitor a bit the situation as I have 14 days to cancel my plan. I'll also see how it works for gitea running in docker in the NAT and ssh forwarding, I suspect this will be a fun endeavour.

I decided to avoid using cloudflare tunnel. And I am avoiding using a nginx proxy at the moment as I would need to ensure the certificates are properly synced between the two (or maybe letsencrypt allows you to have two certificates for the same domain?)

klinkertinlegs,

If your self-served stuff is just for you or family, I use tailscale for that. Nothing publicly enabled, have to be in the tailscale net to access.

shadowbert,
shadowbert avatar

If you don't mind trusting cloudflare, their cloudflare tunnel is a pretty convenient way to host things.

fedev,

IPv6 is a viable option. Depending on how you set things up, you'd have to firewall the devices pretty good as in IPv6, devices are exposed to the internet. All open ports would be accessible.

Katrina,

I have about 25 letsencrypt certificates on the same domain, so that is definitely not an issue.

chiisana,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

Slap CloudFlare tunnel in front of your web services and call it a quits?

Faceman2K23,
@Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Do they not offer an opt-out of CG-NAT? or a surcharge for a static IP?

marsokod,
@marsokod@lemmy.world avatar

No dedicated opt-out offered, but I can migrate to the 3Gbps plan that is not using CG-NAT (for now...) But that is £25/month more expensive. That's a nice VPS.

DaGeek247,
DaGeek247 avatar

Have you considered keeping both plans? You said it was a different isp - dsl and fiber use different cables is it may be possible. Depending on what youre after, this may be a fun project for tying two lines together.

marsokod,
@marsokod@lemmy.world avatar

I did consider it, and I have not cancelled the old one yet. But that becomes more expensive than migrating to the higher end plan without CG NAt of the provider.

2xsaiko,
@2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Do you have IPv6? Just let your service’s IP/port through the firewall.

(If you have no IPv6 but CGNAT, the ISP is bad…)

i_am_not_a_robot,

Your ISP gives you 1Gbps but doesn’t give you your own IP so you need port forwarding?

marsokod,
@marsokod@lemmy.world avatar

Yes exactly

RandomPickle13,

I have a setup for option 3 almost exactly as you describe, using Wireguard to connect the servers to the vps and Nginx on the vps to redirect everything. I dont have any noticable latancy, although I do not run anything that relies on realtime interaction, so ymmv.

lhx,

The last option. VPS are freaking fast, and if you have Gbps at home, that should be plenty fast.

infinitevalence,
@infinitevalence@discuss.online avatar

I would consider cancelling as well because its a bait and switch. BUT if the price and speed are good then just roll with Cloudflare tunnels in docker. It bypasses both their port forward, and your routers and creates essentially a VPN between your containerized services and Cloudflare’s ingress points.

FVVS,

Just use a cloudflare tunnel. It’s free and can be used on pretty much any network that sends and receives data.

ram,
@ram@lemmy.ca avatar

I second this. cloudflare tunnels are nice and convenient af. Fine even if you don’t have a static IP, as long as you’re keeping configs server-side.

manwichmakesameal,

Having your ISP do your port forwarding seems alien to me as that's not the norm where I am. Since it seems like a standard thing where you are, you may run the risk of another ISP doing the same thing. Personally, if the price is right, I'd take the latency hit and get a VPS and route all inbound traffic through that via wireguard.

Sir_Kevin,
@Sir_Kevin@lemmy.world avatar

I would cancel the new ISP on principal. Fool me once shame on you, if they fool me twice it's on me. I wouldn't give them the opportunity to fuck me again.

marsokod,
@marsokod@lemmy.world avatar

Indeed, the way they did that makes me quite angry. But at the same time, that's 1Gbps vs 20Mbps upload, and I was struggling with the limitation when working from home sometimes. The one one is also cheaper so if the tunneling option works without too much pain, I'd be willing to give it a go.

eric5949,

I have TMobile internet so port forwarding as far as I can tell is not possible unless I go with a business plan and in my experience cloudflare tunnels are extremely slow

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