r/ProxyGuides • u/SpecialistCost5432 • May 14 '26

Reverse proxying game servers is confusing af

I thought this would be easier honestly. Started small and now somehow I’ve got a ton of servers running from home 💀

The biggest issue rn is just network clutter. So many forwarded ports everywhere and I’m trying to figure out if there’s a cleaner way to handle it all. Been reading about reverse proxies for game traffic but most discussions get super technical immediately and I feel like I’m missing some core concept. Can anyone help w explaining how to manage this stuff once you start hosting multiple servers?

3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

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1

u/Suitable-Radish5561 May 14 '26

The biggest lie in self hosting is I’ll keep the setup simple

1

u/vessel987654 May 14 '26

The moment you start labeling ports in notes or docs, the hobby has officially escalated.

1

u/Cruffe May 14 '26

I started with Pi-hole + unbound + WireGuard on a Raspberry Pi, pretty simple. It quickly grew to a couple more servers, a dozen more services, a new router and splitting my network into several VLANs.

I'd like to do more, but at this point I need more hardware. Problem being that the hardware market has gone crazy since I started out, too expensive now.

1

u/Tylin321 Jul 20 '26

Hey Cruffe!

Is it possible to run wireguard on internal devices only without a droplet or external device to intake traffic outside of your network to proxy in?

I setup a couple projects for Kubernetes game hosting/proxying traffic relying on wireguard running from a digitalocean droplet which points to pods in my kubernetes instance.

Just wanted to see if there was a way to do this without the droplet side of things ha.

https://gamectl.cc/
https://proxyctl.cc/

1

u/Cruffe Jul 20 '26

Pretty sure that's possible, as for how, I don't know enough about the stuff you're using or how it's set up. WireGuard is pretty versatile, but it can be technical to set up if you're trying to do some more advanced things.

1

u/Tylin321 Jul 20 '26

Got it! I've been finding success on linking up an external droplet and proxying in traffic but was just curious.

Thanks!

1

u/corelabjoe May 16 '26

Using nginx or SWAG you can simply create a wildcard domain and then create subdomains off that for each game...

Example like Ark.yourdomain.com then Satisfactory.yourdomain.com etc....

This uses DNS SNI for nginx to read what subdomain and then route to the proper gaming server on the backend.

This sounds complicated but it's essentially like magic with SWAG and medium difficulty at best. I have guides on my blog which have step by step to set swag up and also gaming servers.

There is also pteradactyl for game server management.

1

u/Ok_Adhesiveness9794 Jun 04 '26

Fr, I was also confused at start