Choosing between a VPS and a dedicated server for hosting a game server is one of the most common decisions a new host operator faces. I have run both setups for Minecraft, Rust, and FiveM communities over the past five years, and the right answer depends almost entirely on your player count, budget, and technical … Read more
Hosting a game server from home is one of the most rewarding projects you can take on as a gamer. You get full control, no monthly fees, and the freedom to mod however you like. But there is one major problem: when players connect to your Minecraft, Valheim, or Rust server, they see your home … Read more
You forwarded every port in your router, double-checked the firewall, and your Minecraft server still refuses outside connections. If that sounds familiar, there is a very good chance your ISP is running Carrier-Grade NAT, and no amount of port mapping on your side will fix it. The good news is CGNAT port forwarding is not … Read more
I hit this wall the exact week I wired up a brand-new fiber line. I had the server ready, the game binary downloaded, the ports pinned in the firewall, and friends chomping at the bit to play. Then I asked my ISP for a public IP and found out I was behind carrier-grade NAT. That … Read more
Hosting a game server at home for your friends sounds like a great weekend project until you realize that one wrong firewall rule can expose your entire network. When I set up my first Minecraft server on an old Ubuntu box, I learned the hard way that running everything as root and forwarding ports blindly … Read more
Hosting a game server from home is one of the best ways to control your multiplayer experience, but a changing IP address breaks player connections fast. The fix is a dynamic DNS hostname for your home game server, which gives you a stable address that always points to your current public IP. In this guide, … Read more
Calculating your game server RAM and CPU requirements comes down to four numbers: player count, mods and plugins, world size, and tick rate. Add the base footprint for the game, then multiply by workload factors, and you will land within 1–2 GB of the real-world answer. I have helped our team size hundreds of Minecraft, … Read more
I’ve run self-hosted game servers for six years, and I’ve been DDoSed more times than I’d like to admit. The first time it happened, my Minecraft community of 40 regular players dropped offline for 11 hours while I scrambled to figure out what hit us. The reality is that game server DDoS protection no longer … Read more
I learned this the hard way. After running a Valheim server for my friend group for nearly a year, I lost 11 months of building progress to a single corrupted world file. That event is the reason I take backups seriously now, and why I wrote this guide on how to set up automatic backups … Read more
Setting up a modded Terraria multiplayer world for the first time can feel like you’re fighting the Moon Lord twice over. I built my first tModLoader dedicated server for a 12-player Calamity group, and half the night disappeared to misnamed files and a missing enabled.json. If you want to know how to configure a Terraria … Read more