Portspan is a self-hosted ngrok alternative that exposes local development ports via predictable wildcard subdomains. It uses frp for tunneling and routing, Nginx for TLS termination, and provides setup scripts, security documentation, and client tooling for Linux servers.
This article compares localhost tunneling tools like ngrok with enterprise edge load balancing solutions such as HAProxy Enterprise, explaining when startups outgrow simple development tunnels and need to transition to production-grade infrastructure for resilience, security, and global distribution.