How to Secure Your VPS or Cloud VM in 2026: Why Tailscale + Cloudflare Tunnel Is the New Standard
The way we host applications is changing fast. A few years ago, spinning up a VPS or cloud virtual machine, assigning a public IP, opening ports 22, 80, and 443, and calling it a day was normal. That approach is becoming increasingly risky. Automated scanners, AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, and constant probing of public IP ranges mean that any service exposed directly to the internet is under continuous attack. I recently went through the process of hardening a production environment while building Blast Post, a social media scheduling platform. During that work I moved away from the traditional “public IP + open ports” model and adopted a combination of Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnel. The difference in security posture is significant. ...