@girish thanks for the info.
Did I understand correctly that the server can download stuff but nobody from the internet can reach the server?
Kind of. It's fine for me to need internet access for initial setup and for updates. In fact I'd like to always be able to access the server over the internet, but I'd also like to be able to connect over the local network. I guess so long as it's possible to connect over the local network I could always VPN into the network and use Cloudron that way. This solution will probably be ok for me, but it's not ideal for the setup I'm trying to make.
I basically have two objectives regarding local network access:
- The Cloudron is going to be used from clients on the same network probably about 75% of the time so I'd like to be able to take advantage of the faster transfer speeds on the local network and not run into bandwidth throttling issues from the ISP (will be doing a lot of large file transfers). But again, I'd still like remote access to be possible and preferably without needing to use a VPN.
- When my network loses internet access I still need to be able to use Cloudron via the local network (I do intend for the Cloudron server to generally have internet access though).
I don't know if it's possible but I think the ideal solution would be similar to what @JOduMonT described where I would host the Cloudron DNS with some big DNS provider like Cloudflare but on my local network DNS (pihole) I would resolve the same domain names to the local address of the Cloudron server instead of the internet address.