The downside of the Cloudflare approach is that yet more websites are behind Cloudflare's control. The VPS approach works pretty much the same way Cloudflare does, but without the centralized control.

On the other hand, Cloudflare is a pretty easy solution against spam bots and scrapers. Probably a better choice if that's something you need protection against.

I think both are great options. Personally I do split-dns so I can access things "directly" while using Tailscale and via Cloudflare Tunnel when I am not.

I also selectively expose via the Cloudflare Tunnel. Most things are tailscale only.

Everyone does these days, although its really the AI scrapers you need defence from and Cloudflare isn't doing so good at that yet.

As someone who actually hosts stuff at home, I'm not sure everyone does. I don't, for one

Maybe if you're on a limited data plan (like in Belgium or on mobile data), you'd want to prevent unnecessary pageloads? Afaik that doesn't apply to most home connections

Or if you want to absolutely prevent that LLMs eat your content for moral/copyright reasons, then it can't be on the open internet no matter who your gateway is

ai scrapers are truly this year's boogeyman

I used to expose a site hosted on my home NAS through it, and now I do the same from a server at Hetzner.

Works like magic :)