For those who don’t know, playit.gg is a free/cheap service for exposing self-hosted local game servers to the wider internet.
But as someone who already has access to a cheapish VPS, I’m curious if anyone knows of any self-hostable alternatives that I could just run as a container on my VPS.
I’ve been toying with using Wireguard UDP tunneling, but it’s proving to be a little bit more difficult and complicated than I was bargaining for. So if anyone knows of anything out there that does something like this, I’d be grateful!
If you already have a VPS, I can recommend Pterodactyl. Basically, a nice GUI to create and manage servers for multiple games, including Minecraft, Counter Strike, other Source games like Left4Dead, … I use it on my VPS to host a small Minecraft and TS3 server for me and my little brother, nothing too fancy, and it works like a charm :)
Aside from Wireguard, you have Wireguard alternatives-but-not-really-since-they-are-based-on-Wireguard like Netbird and Tailscale. The latter is more well-known, but the main downside is that, to connect to the cloud servers, you need a Google, Microsoft, or Github account to login. It can be self-hosted with Headscale (community project) though (and you don’t need an account for that, since it’s your hardware)! Netbird is similar to Tailscale, but you can use normal email login to use their cloud servers, and they offer official self-hosting support.
I am moving to Piefed at scallisto@retrofed.com (https://retrofed.com/u/scallisto)
Use Tailscale, it’s stupid simple. it is a Wireguard wrapper anyways.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System ISP Internet Service Provider NAT Network Address Translation UDP User Datagram Protocol, for real-time communications VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
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It looks like a VPN, just reskinned as-a-service.
If manual Wireguard is giving you trouble, try Netbird.
Why do you need a VPN if you’re just trying to expose game servers to the public?
The game server is probably behind a NAT. I’m standing in the same situation.
Got a small VPS with a TCP VPN to access all my devices despite location, and a comparably powerfull server behind a NAT which I would like to host UDP services on.
It needs to be said that we are talking actual VPNs here, and not “VPN-as-proxy” to spoof your location etc.
Are you unable to port forward?
Can’t port forward through the CGNAT of my ISP, only my own router’s NAT.
That is, unless I buy a unique IPv4 from my ISP.
Have the ISP place their gateway/router into bridge mode. This will pass the public WAN IP directly to your router, allowing it to handle NAT, firewall policies, and port forwarding without double NAT.
I’ve been hosting public-facing servers for several years and regularly run dedicated servers for my son. I keep the ISP gateway in the setup because they provide a substantial discount for using their modem/router rather than connecting the UDM Pro directly to the fiber ONT.
I actually had that up and running before they changed our modem and threw us behind their regular CGNAT. I’ve tried bridging the modem, but it’s no use if the bridge leads to their intermidiary network and not the public internet. :(
They problably hadn’t realized (or didn’t care) that we had a unique IPv4 before, so I was lucky enough that simply opening up the provided modem and my router was enough. Now they want 15€ a month for the same service, but at least it’ll be static…
