Hello,
I am hosting a shared Minecraft server (10-15 users usually) on dedicated hardware somewhere at OVH. I am considering moving this server to my home. I would save 25$ per month doing this, which would be my main motivation.
I am aware of other considerations (I’ll mention them later) but maybe I am missing something? Is there anyone who did the reverse (hosting a service with multiple users, moving them from your home to a hosting company) and what was your reason
Things I already considered:
- when my electricity/connection goes down the server goes down (that’s ok it’s just a game and my connection has always been very very stable)
- hosting at home eats bandwidth (I have 50mbit which is way more than I use, I don’t stream or download much)
- electricity costs money too
- when the server is compromised my home network is compromised (handling servers and networks is my hobby and my job, I think I can make it safe)
Thank you for your thoughts!
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
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.
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 :-)
