A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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Seeing as you say port 25565 you're using Minecraft Java, so i'd prob just do this:
Couple of points:
Make your account PAYG to lessen likelihood of server being shutdown (will still be free)
Take nightly backups just in case.
You could stump up for a management console like AMP if you want to make things a bit easier.
GL.
Sir, this is a selfhosted subreddit
Lol, you're gonna have you work cutout if you're going around downvoting and saying that on every single comment that ever mentions a VPS.
Hosting your own MC server, no matter where, is a perfectly fine 'self-hosted' counterpoint to using a Microsoft Realms subscription. What ridiculous gatekeeping, lol.
You dont get the: this is a wendys joke do you?
And i dont vote for shit. Neither positive nor negative
I got the joke, it just fell flat
Nah, no idea what you're on about. Must be a young man's thing lol.
A colleague wrote this - https://blog.openziti.io/set-up-a-secure-multiplayer-minecraft-server
Now, if I want to invite friends I just ask them to download the Ziti Desktop Edge, create an identity token for them, making sure they have the attribute #${DEVICE_NAME}.clients so they are authorized, and send it their way.
Wow, so quick and convenient!
Definitely not immediately awkward and dumb.
Dude is spending incredibly large amounts of time and effort when what they wanted was a whitelist and SRV record.
I've used tailscale in the past, it's worked great.
If you ever need to remote in to help them set up or configure something, dwservice.net is wonderful and free too
I have a custom portal where players login and tell it to whitelist their IP address. This then feeds into a pfsense dynamic list to allow the traffic through the perimeter firewall.
Works fairly well and it’s semi easy for players to login. This allows me to have it “open” to the internet and not have it hammered from all over the internet. It doesn’t handle dynamic IPs but players public IPs don’t change too regularly most of the time.
Mine is forwarded via caddy through a Google domain. Whitelist for friends and family
Latency is a real issue. I've run Minecraft servers at home and through digital ocean. Latency is real particularly with a lot of players. I kind of have up after my son kind of graduated out of Minecraft phase. I did an inordinate amount of tweaking. Looking back..I probaby would not do it again
I'm running it inside a podman container with 16 G of RAM, with a velocity proxy etc. Should be ideal
How about using ZeroTier? You could omit exposing the server?
Just make sure you whitelist your server, as there are "groups" out there that scan the entire internet for Minecraft servers running on default/common ports, and grief the shit out of whatever they can.
This happened to my server last winter, got scanned and some random tried to join the server, luckily I had whitelist enabled.
Changed ports from default and haven’t had a problem since.
Yeah they're pesky, but I appreciate the ingenuity. They've got custom scanning tools and reporting infrastructure on Discord, one day some of them will make bank away from grieving Minecraft servers heh.
When hosting stuff for friends specifically, I got a firewall rule in place that only allows their duckDNS addresses to connect to whatever I'm hosting, and don't want publicly accessible.
Much safer than a Minecraft whitelist.
I have my servers port forwarded but sitting in their own vlan
If you are willing to put the extra effort in you can try and get aws or Oracle cloud free tier and open ports there and setup some sort of tunneling
I just hosted it as a docker container, exposed the ports and setup a white list.
Never had an issue with it. I have a domain already for other stuff i host, so just created a play..com which can be used behind non proxied cloudflare. I have the docker restrictions pretty limited though so just enough for it to run basically and running from a non root user. I think in most cases this would be fine. White list will stop randoms from joining unless that persons account gets compromised. I also run backups as well just in case something does happen, that role based on activity. All of these are easily done and available in docker making supporting it easy, as well as utilities like Rcon etc, these obviously I don't expose.
I built a Tailnet and gave them access to my VM running the Server.
There is no such thing. Minecraft hackers are brilliant. Dmz that thing, maybe use a vps, run backups constantly, vet your server plug-ins. Backdoors on Minecraft servers are downright routine.