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)?
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/