I have a Jellyfin server, NextCloud instance, etc that I share with friends and family. Currently, I serve them over the open-internet using Cloudflare tunnels. Obviously this has some security implications that I don’t love. Also recently one of my domains got flagged as malicious by google and now Chrome browsers won’t go to the site - annoying.
I use Tailscale already to access my server infra remotely, but honestly I don’t see this as a viable option for my non-technical friends and family. Plus, I need to support all kinds of devices like smart tvs. How do you fine folks deal with this issue?
As much as I like fully self hosting, I ended up paying for Plex lifetime and have it running in docker. It was $120, but has already paid for itself twice over since I managed to convince my wife to drop hbo max, Netflix, and a couple others. She isn’t technical at all so she was hesitant, but she likes plex. If she can’t find what she wants to watch on our few streaming services (paid for by our cell provider, otherwise they’d be cancelled too), she can add it to the watchlist on Plex and radarr or sonarr will download it automatically and make it available on plex pretty quickly (or she’ll tell me to get it and let her know when it’s done).
I could open my Plex server to more family or friends, but most of them either pirate stuff themselves or are fine with paying for streaming services for the ease of use.