Some services run really good behind a reverse proxy on 443, but some others can really become an hassle… And sometimes just opening other ports would be easier than to try configuring everything to work through 443.
An example that comes to my mind is SSH, yeah you can use SSLH to forward requests coming from 443 to 22, but it’s so much easier to just leave 22 open…
Now, for SSH, if you have certificate authentication or a strong password, I think you can feel quite safe, but what about other random ports? What risks I’m exposing my server to if I open some of them when needed for a service? Is the effort of trying to pass everything through 443/80 worth it?
you can reverse proxy other ports than 443 and ex. upstream ssh, the advantage of having reverse proxy over everything is to have traffic in one place so you can manage it, that’s why for example kubernetes have ingress server, example nginx / openresty upstream ssh, you can restrict traffic to limited amount of IP etc.
stream { upstream ssh { server 127.0.0.1:22; } server { listen 2222; ssl_preread on; proxy_pass ssh; } }