So I have a few weeks of experience when it comes to homeservers and everything works the way I want it to apart from me being able to remotely access it without needing a vpn.

I have a registered domain at cloudflare. 2 things here. Depending on what tutorial I watch people seem to use two different approaches but they don’t explain why they use it. They either use zero trust tunnels or they use dns proxy’s. I think zero trust makes more sense but I’m not sure

Another thing I have avoided up until now is dns. I followed tutorial but never learned what exactly they do or what ddns is. Do I need to setup something here? Why do I need to do so?

Lastly, I don’t have a fixed public ip address. I have a vpn I could route the traffic to if needed. I have heard ddns mentioned when it comes to changing IPs. How do I set this up that so my services don’t stop working every time my isp changes my public ip?

With all that, do I need nginx regardless and why?

Sorry if it seems like I’m clueless. I really tried to find a satisfying explaination. I gathered all these bits of info but I’m not able to find the thread connecting it all