Self-Hosted Alternatives to Popular Services

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The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/Eikekie1 on 2025-01-20 23:35:24+00:00.

Sorry if this is a dumb question. I have set up a raspi with home assistant and started using cloudflare tunnels, which are almost too easy to set up. Now I do have some basic networking knowledge but I simply struggle to understand what a cloudflare tunnel is exactly.

I have found many posts discussing the advantages/disadvantages and some basic high level explanation but I don't like this marketing explanation of "tunnel". Could someone please explain to me:

• How it works without opening a port on my router and without me even having a static public IP4 address
• What the difference is to a "normal" reverse proxy / VPN