In effect, Cloudflare would give protection against DDoS attacks before requests would even hit your servers. That much said you can implement mitigations on the reverse proxy itself. One example would be fail2ban.

I’m sure there are additional steps that you can take. I’m not a fan of Cloudflare because their free offering has some caveats and violating these could be problematic. I have a cloud VPS with a WireGuard tunnel back to my server. I don’t have to do anything ugly like port forwarding. The cloud VPS runs NGINX as a reverse proxy. It’s a relatively simple and effective setup.

Thanks! How do you handle that with internal DNS? I suppose you’d need to setup the exact same proxies on the internal and external server, and local DNS handles which one my domain it’s being resolved to?

Right now the internal DNS I use has a TLD of .lan but that’s pretty much for my personal convenience. I access my websites by their FQDN internally with no issue. So I am not sure what your tring to achieve. Mind elaborating?

Of course! So in order to get maximum speed on your services, you wanna use a direct internal route when you're inside your net. My understanding is, that when using an external cloud VPS with a proxy, local clients go through unnecessary routing..

Local request --out--> external VPS (proxy) --request data from internal--> receive data on external proxy --send back--> local client

So what I am saying, all requests are unnecessarily routed through the external VPS. So one would have to create an exact duplicate reverse proxy internally to avoid leaving the net. When accessing domain.com, the internal DNS returns the local proxy IP, when outside you receive the cloud VPS IP.

Or am I missing something?

Thank you for taking the time!