Earlier today, I had a requirement of hosting some data for some family and friends temporarily, the server would be up for 2 days.

Before this, I would use ngrok for such use cases.

But the rate limits put by ngrok in its free tier is abysmally bad and if I host some sort of a file server, it’d be the end of my relationship with my people.

In search of something better (and cheap), I looked at Cloudflare Tunnels, which I’ve heard so many nice things about, how the default WAF is good enough for public exposure. But it requires a secure domain for tunneling to work, and I don’t have one to expend.

At the end, incidentally I came across Tailscale Funnel. Alongside a custom wireguard setup, I also run some devices on Tailscale in my home network. If you already are familiar with Tailscale, you can spawn secure tunnels, without rate limits, and a fixed subdomain.

This is the best of the lot in my opinion.