So because of stuff my ISP started doing, I can’t port forward my home server anymore. The solution I have right now is to tunnel every service manually with an SSH tunnel to my VPS, but it’s very inconvenient and slow.

I am looking for an alternative and I’m wondering if it’s possible to set up a virtual network between my VPS and home server (and also possibly other servers I set up in the future) so they can access each other as if they’re in the same network.

I’m pretty sure I should set up a VPN, but I don’t really know where to start. The thing is that I don’t want to route any of my internet access through the VPN, I just want to be able to access services on my home server from my VPS.

What software should I use and how should I configure it to fit my needs?

I feel like this shouldn’t be too complicated? (Hopefully) But I haven’t been able to fully understand how to setup and configure VPNs like Wireguard or OpenVPN properly myself

Update: Thanks to everyone who recommended Tailscale, it worked instantly with no configuration. Also, the speeds are basically the exact same as my SSH tunnel, I guess my home internet is just not fast enough for the tunnel to become a bottleneck.

But I still kinda want to figure out if it’s possible to replicate something similar to Tailscale using Wireguard so I don’t rely too much on a third-party service (just in case they disappear (probably unlikely) or if they change/remove their free tier). I’m still trying to wrap my head around how to configure Wireguard, but I guess my VPS would be the server and my other servers would be the clients (peers?). Trying to figure out if I would be able to access between peers or not, and if Wireguard would also route internet through it (and if it does, how to disable/stop that)

Also, it looks like one of the differences is that Tailscale is a Mesh VPN so there is no central server, while Wireguard on its own requires a server and the rest of the machine are clients/peers connected to the server (at least that’s how I understand it). This doesn’t really matter to me, I’m fine with having a single server be a centralized server that every other machine connects to. As long as in the end on all the machines it just looks like a regular network where all the machines are accessible through it.

If someone knows a good beginner tutorial for Wireguard please share it. Especially if it specifically replicates how Tailscale works (or is kinda similar). I’m decent at most general Linux stuff, but I’m not very good at networking stuff.

Also it would be useful if someone can share some keywords/terms I should know about this so I can search better. I don’t really know what I should Google, or if this specific thing I’m trying to do has a term/name