What software should I use to actually do the forwarding/proxying?

I highly recommend Pangolin. It does exactly what you’re looking for: Establishes a tunnel between your home server and the VPS, to proxy services on your home network through the VPS.

It also automatically sets up LetsEncrypt certs for your web services, and provides an optional security layer so only authenticated users can get through the proxy.

You can also do TCP and UDP port forwarding for non-web services.

What’s a good VPS provider for this?

I use Racknerd. You will need an affiliate link to get a good deal. I would not recommend the services they offer directly; the prices are considerably higher. Pangolin’s quick-start guide has affiliate links for three services; I use the 2gb option. They have other options, but we’ll have to move to DMs.

So, I’ve come to the realization that I should probably set up a VPS, since that should solve basically all of my issues. All I want is something that can forward/proxy gigabit traffic to my server, probably over something like wireguard.

Forgive my addled brain. Are you wanting a VPS to set up a VPN like Wireguard? If so, the VPS won’t have to be anything huge I would imagine. For something like that, I would go shopping at lowendbox.com. The important bits would be the speed rather than size of the VPS. Also, since you mentioned you already have Docker running, Wireguard Easy, would be the easiest to deploy.

I think a few people already mentioned some good solutions. I just wanted to add: A port forwarding in the firewall of your router is the basically the same thing as a port forwarding on your Linux computer’s firewall. You could just set up any VPN, SSH tunnel or whatever and then use your firewall (nftables, iptables) and forward the VPS’ extetnal port to the internal port on the VPN. It’s the same thing you do on your router, just that you don’t get a graphical interface to configure it.

so i’ve seen some great answered here. Some folks are leery of some companies but so far i have found that Tailscale and Cloudflare a great combination. My ISP doesn’t let you port forward and TS & CF circumvent that nicely. Zero issues, both free services and saves me a ton of headache.

I just recently set this up for myself. I used Racknerd (they have crazy deals you can find on racknerdtracker which, to my understanding, work because any unclaimed deals they’ve ever offered don’t expire). If you’re only using it as an access point for stuff you’re hosting at home, you can get a cheap 1 core kvm with appropriate speed and data limits, and connect with wireguard (or as other people have said, pangolin or similar services)

Pangolin (or netbird) on the vps. I can recommend something with at least a gig of ram from ionos. The rest doesn’t matter. Then just paste the vpn snippet on the local service compose (assuming you are using docker) and be done with it. Works like a charm.

Pangolin might be interesting for you.

Yup, a VPN is how I’m doing it. I just set up Netbird, with a relay on a tiny free Google Cloud VM, and it was extremely easy. You can use any host, really.

Depends on how you want to access stuff away from home, I have both a tinc mesh VPN and pangolin tunnels.

They serve different purposes, tinc is to get from home to my Dedi and the VPS. Pangolin is to assess stuff away from home.

As I’ve just moved to starlink I to now don’t have a static IP and this has made the move almost transparent

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

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I have not done it but I understanding is file player has a service that does this for you, obviously not self hosted in that regard but still a popular choice.