Well that leaves me with mixed feelings.

Thread itself doesn’t need Internet connectivity, but thread seems to almost always be paired with matter, which does (during provisioning).

I like that matter provisioning requires verification of their certificate, but I don’t like that certificates can expire or the certificate authority can shut down. Although maybe that’s all taken care of by the DCL? In which case that’d be fine.

It seems similar in purpose to pangolin, how do they differ?

Can you explain a bit more about the setup?

Like would just using a VPS with pangolin secure tunnel work? Or does it have to be a vpn for some other reason?

Asking because maybe the question really boils down to the VPS provider with the best data transfer rates

If you’re just starting to build out, what about using thread instead of zigbee or zwave?

If you’re getting a VPS I’d generally recommend getting pangolin. It’s basically like cloudflared tunnels, but self hosted (on the vps). It works the same, you use it to map your subdomains to IPs on the other end of the secure tunnel.

It has things like user access controls for each of the subdomains, the ability connect it to an identity provider, rules governing which paths need authentication and which don’t, etc.

It can optionally come preconfigured with crowedsec, but I had problems with it falsely classifying my normal traffic as an attack and banning my IPs.

Just be aware that even if your service has a login page, you first need to log into pangolin to be granted access to the service, and although that’s fine on the web (especially if you’re using an sso), some native apps don’t like the extra login. Homeassistant handles it better now, but I haven’t gotten jellyfin native android app working yet.

I agree except crowedsec. The apps I use were frequently phoning home, causing all my devices to get banned by crowedsec. Setting up rules around it was just too painful so I got rid of it.
Gonna look into if I can set up fail2ban with it instead

I hate how so many of the arr apps don’t describe what they do in a way that people who don’t already know can understand.

Even the tutorials and guides are frustratingly vague.