I have to say that I might be the one here to say something different, but I still use Cloudflare tunnels because I have been with them for so long. I know lots of people hate them, for various reasons, but in this simple example, cloudflare will have many people who have used it, and it really just kinda works. So for getting started, it probably will be easier and quicker... A free account is good enough, will make the services available easily, and is secure enough for most people within reason. Once you are up and running you can change it moving forward.

Forgot to add - Cloudflare also acts as a CDN meaning a slow internet connection isn't as bad as it could be. This is another reason I like it - it's free and does help out if you have a slower connection. It isn't a fix all solution, you still need to ensure that you are protected as well as you can be, have certs, use https, lock the server down as much as you can. Use fail2ban or something similar to stop brute force attacks.... do as much as you can to help yourself. But it is easy to use to get you on your way to self hosting, which for me is a win.