Are public urls VPS safe to use?
 

hello all

I'm new to doing server stuff with linux. I've always used linux exclusively for desktop usage.

I bought a raspberry pi zero w and I want to do ssh tunneling from outside my home.

Doing my research, I found these two websites ngrok.com and localhost.run. Both offer public urls without the the need to mess with our router's port forwarding.

Both of these sites offer free public urls to access to our devices running a service like ssh, vnc, plex, etc.

Is this safe? Has anyone used these services or others that are free or paid?
Thanks

How can I request this post move to the linux server section?

I used noip.com successfully for five years. I don't know about those others. Check your ISP's terms of service, though. Many of them prohibit public-facing servers for normal home accounts. Some enforce that ban much more aggressively than others; many even block port 80 (there are ways around that, though).

As for moving the thread, click the "Report" button beneath your first post and send a message to a mod with your request.

Thanks Frank. I will look at the site, noip.com.

Anyway, if I do decide to do this, it's for personal reason and not for commercial business.

I just want to do ssh tunneling into my home when I'm outdoors.

Thanks again.

If that's all you do, the odds are that your ISP will not notice. But don't tell anyone I said that.

Full Disclosure: Back when I used noip.com, I was self-hosting my website from a computer in my guest room. (Indeed, the reason I started using Linux was that someone told me I could use it to self-host my website. Before that, it was a members.aol.com site.) My ISP at the time prohibited "hosting services" from home accounts. Had they confronted me, I was prepared to argue that I was not running a "hosting service," even as I took my website off line. But they never noticed me.

Then I moved to an area where the cable company was much more hostile to public-facing servers (they blocked port 80, which my previous ISP did not), so I moved my website to a hosting service which has served me well for over a decade now.

As an aside, I get why ISP's are hostile to public-facing servers from home accounts. It has much more to do with preventing spam (remember "open relays"?) than it has to do with driving users to business-level accounts.