My end goal is to be able to access my Home Assistant server from the outside network without exposing port forwarding on my router for the sake of better security.
I think that Cloud Flare is a good option to achieve that.
The problem is that my ISP provides dynamic IP - I don’t have a static IP address. Therefore, I’m using TP-Link Cloud’s DDNS service to get a resolvable dns name.
So I have this XXX.tplinkdns.com hostname that resolves to my IP thanks to TP-link’s DDNS service.
My question here is - how do I connect this to CloudFlare? I’m not that familiar with the Cloud Flare service but as far as I know - I’m supposed to register my website root domain and then add DNS records in Cloud Flare. However, I don’t own the root domain tplinkdns.com - so I don’t think I can register that into Cloud Flare.
What do I have to do in order to configure the Cloud Flare tunnel in Home Assistant and use XXX.tplinkdns.com to access my server?
You need a domain, not a Dynamic DNS domain. Then with that domain configured at Cloudflare you can configure a tunnel - no port forwarding, no need to worry about static vs dynamic IP.
I don’t own a domain of my own and I don’t feel like paying a registrar for one since I don’t plan on hosting an actual website.
Plus, I already have a resolvable dns name.
Is this this really the only way to use cloud flare? Have an own domain? This is a bit disappointing
At the end of the day, your HA is exposed to the world, be it through cloudflare tunnels or port forwarding, and that’s the real security risk, not quite script kiddies running nmap on your router (which they can anyway).
If you are concerned with security, use a VPN like tailscale.
