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)?
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.