I’ve been increasingly getting into the idea of hosting some servers for classic PC games like Counter Strike 1.6 and various Half-Life mods, but I’m curious what the consensus is for what the best options are for doing so right now.
I have some experience hosting servers at home in a “homelab” kind of context (mostly for stuff like Jellyfin, Samba, etc.), and I know how to spin up docker containers and administer a Linux computer decently for LAN use. Right now I use tailscale to access my homelab stuff remotely, but I don’t know if that would work well in the context of hosting a public game server.
Generally I don’t have much knowledge about safely exposing my local hardware to the wider internet for my circle of ~20 friends to join.
So basically I’m wondering what you all would do for hosting game servers if you were going to start today…
Would you use local hardware with port forwarding? Or would you go with a VPS (and if so, can you recommend one for North America)?
Tailscale works great, but their free tier is limited to a total of 8 users, which is enough for a tiny minecraft server, but doesn’t seem to be enough for your usecase.
For 10-15+ users, you probably want to self host a VPN on your own VPS. Like, you can self host headscale, which is tailscale but self hosted. : https://github.com/juanfont/headscale [1]
I wouldn’t port forward game servers, because they often lack authentication (login and stuff), and then they also have security issues due to not receiving updates. If your game server isn’t truly public, then it’s easier to just have people use the tailscale client to connect to your VPN.
[1] Although I would recommend headscale to OP for it’s simplicity, it is very barebones, and software like netbird or netmaker is more close to a truly self hosted tailscale, with things like more advanced accounts, OIDC integration, authorization, and so on. But they are more annoying to host and set up.
A cheap vps is cheap and easy, and doesn’t require exposing your local network or making your friends install a VPN client. Old games don’t need much in terms of resources, but you may have trouble running them on a modern OS.
Note that because of that, you will be using software that almost certainly has known vulnerabilities. Take a backup or a snapshot in a known-good state that you can easily roll back to, and shut it down when you’re not using it, if possible.
no idea about which game server, but i would definitely put everything behind a vpn and give the connector to the 20 friends.
nowadays a vpn connector is available for every platform and the peace of mind you get is priceless.
Pay digital ocean $5/month for a little VPS and call it a day
If it is really only a private server for your friends, and they are not completely computer illiterate, then a Wireguard VPN or similar seems like the safest option.
But generally speaking it isn’t that big of a deal to temporarily open a port and forward it to a game server if you want to play a round online.
A VPS is not really cost effective for that kind of usage. Maybe one with hourly billing like this: https://tierhive.com/
