How CGNAT Blocks Home Servers and Why Cloudflare Offers a Free Fix
A developer documenting a zero-cost self-hosting project discovered that setting up Nginx and port forwarding was not enough to make a home server publicly accessible. After configuring port forwarding and testing from a mobile network, the website failed to load, prompting an investigation into why the server's apparent public IP began with 10.x.x.x — a private address range. The root cause turned out to be CGNAT (Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation), a practice common among Indian ISPs that places multiple home routers behind a single shared public IPv4 address. This architecture means individual users cannot directly receive inbound internet traffic, since they do not control the public IP — a consequence of the global IPv4 address shortage. Paying the ISP for a dedicated public IP was ruled out to preserve the zero-spend goal, leading the developer to explore Cloudflare as a potential free workaround.
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