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I’m Adam Conway, an Irish technology fanatic with a BSc in Computer Science and I’m XDA’s Lead Technical Editor. My Bachelor’s thesis was conducted on the viability of benchmarking the non-functional elements of Android apps and smartphones such as performance, and I’ve been working in the tech industry in some way or another since 2017.

In my spare time, you’ll probably find me playing Counter-Strike or VALORANT, and you can reach out to me at adam@xda-developers.com, on Twitter as @AdamConwayIE, on Instagram as adamc.99, or u/AdamConwayIE on Reddit.

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When it comes to home labbing, security is something that you need to take seriously from day one. Many self-hosted applications are just as useful when you’re out and about, and configuring that secure access can be quite difficult to get right for someone new to the space. If you’re new, "best practices" when it comes to secure, remote access can be hard to figure out, and with a litany of contradicting information out there, it can be overwhelming to even get started. That’s why, if I had to pick one tool for a new self-hoster to learn first, it would be Tailscale.

"But the point of home labbing is to learn" I hear you say. That’s true, but what you want to learn isn’t what everyone wants to learn. If you plan on remotely accessing your home lab, then ensuring your remote access is secure is the most important step. I felt overwhelmed by options when I first started, but a friend of mine told me to get started with Tailscale, ignore all of the other options, and I can revisit my setup down the road when I’m ready to do that.

Lo-and-behold, I’m now at that point. I love Tailscale, and I’m not in a rush to leave it, but I’m finally in a position where I can explore other options and feel comfortable to do just that. I’ve experimented with Netbird, Cloudflare Tunnels, and even completely permissive external access for some services with a Cloudflare proxy in front. And if I hadn’t got started with Tailscale, who knows what I would have went with and what the consequences of a potentially half-baked solution would have been.

Starting with Tailscale helped me focus on the fun parts of home labbing

This helped me hit the ground running

What starting with Tailscale gave me, more than anything else, was time. It let me actually use my home lab remotely without turning security into the first hard blocker I had to overcome, and meant that I could host anything I wanted as I could access them while away. I didn’t need to understand firewall rule ordering, NAT traversal, split tunneling, or certificate management just to log into a dashboard while away from home. Things simply worked, and that meant I could focus on learning the parts of self-hosting that kept me interested in the first place.

That matters more than people like to admit. A lot of newcomers bounce off home labbing not because the ideas are too complex, but because it can be hard to even get started. You spin up your first service, then immediately hit a wall: "How do I access this safely from outside my network?" If the answer is a 12-step guide involving port forwarding, reverse proxies, TLS, DNS, and a stern warning about exposing anything to the internet, it’s no surprise many people either give up or take shortcuts they don’t fully understand. The first puts people off the idea entirely, and the second risks causing actual harm.

Tailscale quietly sidesteps that entire phase. It gives you a private network that behaves the way you expect a network to behave, without requiring you to earn that simplicity through weeks of trial and error. Every device has an identity. Everything is encrypted by default. Nothing is publicly exposed unless you explicitly decide it should be. For a beginner, it’s invaluable, and I know from experience. I consider myself fairly adept when it comes to servers (I’ve been running Linux servers for over a decade), but networking, specifically home networking, was not something I had much familiarity with.

I remember when I first started with a humble TrueNAS machine, I self-hosted Home Assistant, Nextcloud, PhotoPrism, and Jellyfin. I loved all four services, but my inability to access them remotely was a killer and almost killed my ambition entirely. I had experimented with DDNS and my personal domain, but it didn’t feel robust or consistent, and I didn’t like having a public facing service, even if a password was required to gain access past a login page. Once I set up Tailscale for remote access that was both reliable and safe, I felt more comfortable brainstorming new ideas, new services, and trying out all sorts of tools. Not everything stuck, but that’s the beauty of home labbing. Sometimes the cloud is just better for a specific service or even a specific type of person, and that’s okay.

Now, I’m in the process of slowly migrating some of my services away from Tailscale. I love what it can do and how it works, and I especially love how it enabled me to bridge a gap that risked turning me off of home labbing for good. I’ve been able to slowly build up my knowledge of networking and secure remote access, without my lack of knowledge being a blocker to a deployment in general. If something doesn’t work and I don’t have time to fix it, I can just switch back over to Tailscale as a fallback.

You don’t need to learn everything when it comes to home labbing

It’s meant to be fun, so enjoy it

Can home labbing be a learning experience? Absolutely! In fact, it arguably should be. With that said, I often find that people mistakenly state that the learning process should apply to all aspects of home labbing. Not everyone cares about networking, and if Tailscale works as a secure, easy to use, and safe way to access self-hosted services, it’s a perfectly valid tool to rely on for exactly that. It’s the same for any hobby. Think about your own hobbies; chances are, there’s one particular aspect you sink less time into than others who have the same broad love of the same interest as you.

Home labbing, like many hobbies, is already a broad discipline. You might be interested in automation, media servers, smart homes, backups, containers, virtualization, or monitoring. Forcing yourself to master secure remote access, DNS, and firewalling before you’re "allowed" to touch any of that is a recipe for burnout and waning interest. The irony is that once you’re actually invested, and when your lab does useful things for you day to day, you’re far more motivated to learn the underlying systems properly. And that includes using the other features of Tailscale, as it’s far more than just a remote access tool.

That’s where I find myself now. I’m experimenting with alternatives not because Tailscale failed me, but because I finally understand enough to evaluate their trade-offs. I can weigh the convenience of Tailscale against the control that I give up, and more importantly, I can roll back changes that break my access without needing to frantically Google and figure out something else new while building a home lab for the first time. That feeling of safety and confidence comes with time, and Tailscale massively helped me achieve that.

All of this is why I recommend Tailscale as a starting point. It’s not about taking "shortcuts," nor is it about "doing it wrong." It’s reducing the risk while keeping the hobby fun and tailored to what you care about. If you later decide to replace it with something else, you’ll likely be in a position where it’s possible to do that safely and confidently. Home labbing shouldn’t be intimidating, and you don’t need to learn everything on day one. And you certainly don’t need to suffer in order to earn the right to experiment. If a tool helps you stay curious, productive, and safe while you build confidence, then it’s doing exactly what it should.