This should be excellent for selfhosters that have all their services in one VM. I haven’t tried this myself, but I think this means you can:
- you can create memorable links instead of memorizing port numbers:
jellyfin.foo-bar.ts.net - share one service from a machine instead of all of them in a more intuitive way
If you’re new to Tailscale Services, it lets you publish internal resources like databases, APIs, and web servers as named services in your tailnet, using stable MagicDNS names. Rather than connecting to individual machines, teams connect to logical services that automatically route traffic to healthy, available backends across your infrastructure. This decoupling makes migrations, scaling, and high availability far easier, without reconfiguring clients, rewriting access policies, or standing up load balancers. Our documentation has details on use cases, requirements, and implementation.
That’s one way to look at it. I used to look at paid VC-funded services like that. I no longer do as I’ve observed services I pad good money for get more expensive much faster than inflation and decrease in quality and features at the same time. It’s one reason I self-host many services I used to pay third parties for. I now look to alternatives from the get go and derisk existing dependencies. To be clear - profitability isn’t merely the only problem. The ownership and its profit growth strategy (and expecrations) are. Those are not the same in a decades old ISP and a VC-funded startup.