Hey, c/selfhosted! Thanks to all who participated in my recent ‘2026 Self-Host User Survey’. This community contributed a bunch to this year’s increase in respondents (+52%), and I’m incredibly grateful for the support.
The results are visualized as usual via Chart.js. Happy to talk through any of the results or provide more details where things might not be clear.
New this year is a section on AI usage, a Linux distribution question, and the ability to overlay prior year responses on the charts for easier year-over-year comparisons.
Thanks again!
How was this question phrased? A reverse proxy still needs “forwarded ports in some capacity”…
Nitpicking and very specific case - but it is not necessarily true if you use a VPS to host the reverse proxy. I have a wireguard tunnel in pfsense where I configure my VPS as a peer and all communication between VPS and home happens over that tunnel. Doesn’t require me to open any ports in my home. This also lets me have two layers of access control - through allowed ip in wireguard config and through interface firewall rules in pfsense.
It was along the lines of, “How do you reach your apps/services outside your LAN?” I doubt anyone forwarding 443 for their proxy selected ‘forwarded ports’, but now you have my second guessing myself…
I understood as you explained here. Before I started using a proxy manager and a public domain I would have to forward the ports on my router for each service I wanted to access over the LAN (inside/outside).