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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What is your upload speed? Many ISPs give you 50 download but <5 upload, that would be a huge bottleneck
The biggest issue is security though. Unless you're setting up a VPN that only works when you set up a secured client on each device, I wouldn't trust that server to have access anywhere on the network. I would strongly recommend against opening any ports on your firewall as well. Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels are popular for homelabs that might be useful here and free for your use case
AFAIK the most secure way to host stuff on your home network is to set up a locked down, firewalled VLAN for it.
I have 50/50 speed so that's ok.
And having a single open port in my firewall won't do much. I'm trying to think of a scenario that is not secure. If the Minecraft service itself is hacked, then tailscale or Cloudflare tunnels won't help me, because they will probably gain the same access rights as the user that I created for the server. Or am I missing something?
Weird TCP packets ? I probably receive those already, server or not.
You will want to isolate the Minecraft server because it is notoriously easy to hack. If you can isolate it then Cloudflare is better than exposing your IP and opening ports at least. Tailscale would require registering each client using VPN so it isn't accessable by anyone except trusted clients, and you're not exposing ports/IP.
No matter what though, don't let that server be able to talk to anything else on your network or even the admin login on your router/firewall. Treat it like it contains malware already
Easy to hack: I've been Minecraft admin for a while now and never heard about that, do you have a source on that?
I follow various red-team security researchers, like the Security This Week podcast, which has mentioned how easy it makes their jobs when they find a Minecraft server on either the employees network or even a work network.
I'm sure many of the vulnerabilities come from modding like the recent fractureiser virus going around lately. If you kept it 100% vanilla it would be more secure, but at the end of the day you have a platform designed to run modified code, most of which is downloaded from external sources, and you're going to open that up to the world? I certainly don't want that within ping's reach of my home computer or firewall
If the hardware breaks, you'll have to replace it. Although that might be the same in your current solution, don't know if you're just renting space for your own hardware or if you're renting.
I'm renting hardware, so if it breaks I probably get the same hardware (and I am assuming backups will be on me). Yeah that is a valid consideration. It will cost me at least several days to find replacement hardware.
The main consideration I believe is missing is the cost of the hardware where you will be hosting the server. Maybe you have a old computer lying around, in that case its not an issue of course. By the way 25$ per month seems a bit expensive, there are probably cheaper alternatives, just for the sake of comparison.
For a VPS it is expensive, but this is dedicated hardware. A Minecraft server needs a decent CPU (not many cores) and is memory hungry, so a minimum of 16GB. Needs decent ping all over the world.
Because of the last requirement I considered ovhcloud and hetzner and this one is still relatively cheap?
is this a public server? would you be at risk of DDoS attacks?
No, not public.
If you don't mind around 4 hours of downtime per month (for now) I could host it for you at renn.es (contact info is there, just send us an email and we'll send you an invite to a matrix room or something). We basically have a great server with nothing on it, so having one more service running wouldn't really have any impact (we have 2-3 gigs of ram usage avg. out of 32).
EDIT: the server is in france with 6gbps down and 2 gigs up
Thank you for the offer but I like the idea of having my hardware too :-)