I use Pangolin on a kinda cheap VPS on Hetzner (they’re now a bit too pricey), and route my services through Site Connectors (Newt, it’s called). Dealing with opening my firewall is a pain I don’t wanna think about, but Pangolin creates a websocket and can do NAT traversal from the Site Connector, so no swiss-cheesing your firewall.

It’s nice because you can contain different services with VLANs to further segment and protect your network, and each Site Connector can work for many services (if there’s no firewall rules restricting it/VLANs) or you can put a Site Connector on each server individually, if segmentation is important to you.

I have successfully set up Synapse Matrix server twice before and it is still a ridiculous convoluted mess. Something like Conduit for Matrix might be better, but progress there is glacial.