Big P

I use it as a last resort backup for things that are worth the recall price if I lose them

Docker still makes sense on your own hardware. Especially if you’re the type of person to try out different programs often

Zerotier, although it’s similar to tailscale so you might have issues with it too

I’ve done it with docker swarm and it was awful, the connection latency would break the cluster constantly

You still need a reverse proxy just doesn’t need to be on a seperate server. If you want to do it without people having to install something, you may be able to use cf tunnels for the web pages but game servers definitely don’t work through that and you’d have to have some sort of external forwarding. Keep in mind though that will introduce possibly an unacceptable amount of lag to the server.

As far as I’m aware you don’t need a seperate VPS if you’re using tailscale, or you don’t need tailscale of you use a reverse proxy via a vps. You can just host it in the same place you’re hosting the games and apps.

Install promtail on the system where you want to get the logs from, then configure it with the paths to the log files and the address of the loki server

https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/send-data/promtail/?pg=oss-loki&plcmt=quick-links

Loki with grafana

I think googling poe or poe computing will give you it

That’s what the word “for” implies in the title

What does using a good firewall mean exactly? As I understand it a port is either open or closed right? So what does a good firewall do that a bad one doesn’t?

Without more information it’s impossible to say.