I want to start a hosting company from home.
I have servers, my only issue is internet. I don’t understand how i would be able to give out my public ip without putting my self at risk. Mainly game hosting like minecraft etc. Is there something with cloudflare like tunnels or something i could use that would mask all my information on the ip or cloudflare gives a drop in replacement or how would it work in general. Not a big hosting company just something small 20-30 users. Just have a few servers at home why not put them to good use 🙂
25 Replies
Let’s not call it a company. A small project scaling 20-30 customers.
Tunnels would be the ideal, just not sure if you can transit non http traffic that way
Youd be better off performance and stability wise running some very small ec2 instances in aws or buying a vps in digital ocean
Hetzner and Digital ocean are fairly cheap
So rather then using my own servers i rent a VPS and make a hosting service off that?
The main thing is servers from having my own i benefit from that. I can create high quality grade plans for my customers
Yup… running stuff at home will run up your powerbills
And also you need to factor in stability and maintenancr
Yeah i already have maintenance and stability
Internet speeds, cooling, high power bills.
I ran servers at home for a long time for games, and id always get weird network blips or drops and occasional power outage
That’s all sorted
The main thing for me right now is internet
Tunnels can't do game server connections without the client installing software (cloudflared, or WARP Private Networking) to connect.
Recommendations would be to either use a proper provider, some cheap ones like OVH or Hetzner have some protection and are still pretty affordable, use some other tunnel service that supports tcp/udp (I think ngrok, there's another minecraft specific one I can't remember), or use a VPS (potentially with DDoS Prot) and GRE/Wireguard tunnel back to expose your local services (they would be exposed on the VPS's Public IP), none of which Cloudflare offers.
Cloudflare has Spectrum for arbitrary tcp/udp protection (but expensive outside of Ent contracts, and no integration with tunnels, and limited to a few protocols like Minecraft outside of Enterprise) or Magic Transit (whole network protection, very Enterprise)
ngrok seems like a decent option, could you tell me more about it?
Not to mention, if you are making this a business. Using a 3rd party to host helps with your uptimes and your responsibility for uptimes as its a lot less maintenance. Also putting in cloud makes for easier patching updating and image management and helps you do more on-demand spin up for other games or services
Could you explain further how i would use ngrok to execute this?
On ngrok's paid tier they give you an IP/Custom domain, looks like it's TCP only though. I haven't used it myself, it's still not a perfect option for reasons stated above, self-hosting generally is meh
So ngrork is not a good idea?
I think the general idea here is that while there are serviceable solutions to put personal stuff on the internet(CF Tunnels, ngrok, etc.), we probably wouldn't recommend hosting paid services from home. If you really want to do it with your servers, you might be able to get a colocation agreement with a local datacenter.
Note too that some ISPs may look poorly upon you using a residential connection for Minecraft hosting, through a Tunnel or not. While you can probably get away with hosting a server for you and your friends, Minecraft is not a very bandwidth efficient application, and thus if you are running it for multiple users, it might not go well.
If you buy a cheap VPS with DDoS protection you could use that to tunnel the servers.
I do it myself using NGINX.
👆💯
Use a VPS as IP forwarder
I mean, if you are going to the lengths of using a VPS for IP Forwarding, then why not just host the server on the VPS too…
A cheap vps for only forwarding traffic is fine instead of renting alot resources
How would it work?
Can you explain ?
VPS to forward all the TCP, UDP traffic to your home IN & OUT so thats your own IPV4 then
something else that I saw touched on but not explicitly mentioned: hosting from home is fine. charging for it turns your hosting into a service and services usually include availability agreements. people expect to be able to use the services they pay for, so any downtime or negligence on your part could open you up to a lawsuit depending on the consumer protection laws governing your area.
2¢
Hosts have their Terms of Service that users have to agree right
Yes.
old discussion but if you have a powerful machine at home, it's cheaper to host the server there and just have an el cheapo $5 at most vps with ddos protection, especially with something like minecraft servers where they can be resource intensive, a VPS would fold but using it to forward traffic to a more powerful home server is fine.