Sounds like you don’t need the VPS then. Add a subdomain to your home IP. Port forward 443 and 80 to the sever. Run caddy to route the subdomain to localhost:8096. You will also need to tell jellyfin to accept on the new domain.

5 actually because you can use minimal hardware. You can probably just port forward your router and run caddy on the same jellyfin server but then expose your home IP address.

Obscuring home IP is the big one. You also don’t have to fiddle with opening ports on your router and maybe getting ISP attention for hosting on a residential network. But really obscuring home IP address would work.

Dirt simplest solution is caddy on the same jellyfin server and port forward 443 and 80 on your router to that host. Hopefully letsencrypt will work without a domain but I’m not sure.

But I ran into challenges getting my server safely accessible for users outside my LAN

FWIW:

1. vps + domain (optional?)
2. connect vps to home server with wireguard (eg Tailscale)
3. reverse proxy on the VPS forwarding to jellyfin (eg Caddy)

Obviously not as trivial or seamless as Plex. Also I wouldn’t try to complicate this setup by using docker for everything. But once its up you can basically host whatever you want on the WAN from your LAN.

At no point should C++ be considered “lawful” or “good”. Haskell would be the best.