Networking

Traefik vs Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager: Reverse Proxy Showdown 2026 Every self-hoster hits the same wall: you’ve got a dozen services running on different ports, and you want clean URLs with HTTPS. You need a reverse proxy. The question is which one. Traefik, Caddy, and Nginx Proxy Manager are the three most popular choices in the self-hosting world. They all solve the same core problem — route app.yourdomain.com to the right container with automatic SSL — but they do it very differently. ...

Setting Up Gluetun: VPN Container for All Your Docker Services You’ve got a media stack running — maybe Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent. Or you’re running a web scraper, a Tor relay, or just a browser that needs to look like it’s in another country. You want VPN protection, but you don’t want to tunnel your entire server through a VPN and lose access to everything else. Gluetun solves this elegantly. It’s a lightweight Docker container that runs a VPN client (WireGuard or OpenVPN), and any other container can use it as its network gateway. Only the containers you choose get routed through the VPN. Everything else stays on your normal network. ...

Running Caddy Server: The Zero-Config HTTPS Reverse Proxy You’re running a dozen Docker containers. Each one listens on a different port. You’re tired of remembering 192.168.1.50:8096 for Jellyfin and :3000 for Gitea. You want jellyfin.yourdomain.com with HTTPS — and you don’t want to wrestle with Nginx config files or manually renew Let’s Encrypt certificates. Caddy does all of this automatically. Point a domain at it, tell it where your service lives, and it handles HTTPS certificates, renewal, and reverse proxying with almost zero configuration. ...

Running multiple self-hosted services on one server creates a problem: they all need different ports. Nextcloud on 8080, Jellyfin on 8096, Grafana on 3000 — and you’re expected to remember all of them. Worse, none of them have SSL unless you set it up manually. Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) fixes this by giving you a clean web UI to manage reverse proxy hosts, automatically provision SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, and control access — all without touching a single Nginx config file. ...