After Buying a Domain, Use Cloudflare Tunnel to Turn Home Services into Public HTTPS

Thu, 21 May 2026 11:38:00 +0800

Short version

The previous two posts covered the cheap-domain part and the Cloudflare DNS part: buy a low-cost .xyz domain for personal lab use, then move the domain to Cloudflare for nameservers, DNS, DDNS, email routing, and basic automation. This post continues with the next practical step: use Cloudflare Tunnel to expose an internal web service as a public https:// hostname. The important point is that visitors use standard HTTPS on port 443, while your home router does not need to forward ports 80 or 443 and your origin IP does not need to be exposed.

This article follows these two posts:

“Ten Years for 80 Yuan: Why I Prefer 6-Digit .xyz Domains for Personal Sites”
Original link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tbefnWGFI0QBFlRVcYjVEw
“Do Not Waste That 80-Yuan Ten-Year Domain: Put It on Cloudflare First”
Original link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/h0o-vtGB_zj1aptaumBztQ

Those posts already covered buying a cheap .xyz domain, moving nameservers to Cloudflare, creating DNS records, using DDNS, and setting up email-related records. This post assumes that your domain is already active on Cloudflare. We will focus on one thing: publishing an internal web service through Cloudflare Tunnel with a clean public HTTPS hostname.

All examples in this article use documentation placeholders such as example.xyz, nas.speedtest.example.xyz, 192.0.2.10, localhost, and <TUNNEL_TOKEN>. No real domain, account, token, zone ID, private network address, or personal information is included.

Tunnel on Margrop Blog

After Buying a Domain, Use Cloudflare Tunnel to Turn Home Services into Public HTTPS