At work, we were constantly running into the same problem. A tester needs to check something, a client wants to preview a build, someone's on a different network - and the only options were spinning up a cloud server (overkill for testing), using ngrok (URLs die the moment you close the terminal), or asking everyone to physically come to the machine. None of these were sustainable.
So I set up a proper testing infrastructure using Cloudflare Tunnel on a spare Windows machine we had. Every project now has a permanent public HTTPS URL, accessible from anywhere in the world, that survives reboots - zero cloud cost.
Here's exactly how I built it.
How It All Connects
Before getting into the setup, it helps to understand the architecture:
