Centralization is bad for everyone everywhere.
That bring said… I just moved my homeserver to another city… and I plugged in the power, then I plugged in the ethernet, and that was the whole shebang.
Tunnels made it very easy. No port forwarding no dns configuration no firewall fiddling no nothing.
Why do they have to make it so so easy…
Not entirely. CF can protect you from DDOS of up to a few millions of calls per minute. Your home router would melt with that traffic. They also act as a firewall if you enable the proxy dns feature. They do a sanity check before forwarding the call. Also a home router cannot do this. And there’s more.
Both your ISP and CF will drop you like a hot potato if you’re ever under that kind of attack.
CF has other features that are nice like, like WAF, bot detection, geo blocking, caching etc. But it’s only a taste.
All their real services are paid and the whole reason they offer a free tier is to upsell you to their paid services.