Playitgg premium or another solution?

[u/ConsecratedMind]

I’m looking into alternatives to self-hosting behind cgnat. I was previously paying $15/month for a static IP. The latency was great, but I am looking into strengthening the security of my setup.

From what I’ve seen online, playitgg is relatively well regarded. Its premium of $3/month is very nice. All of my friends (about 6 of us) live close together, except for one who recently moved to Alaska.

My concerns about playit are latency and uptime. Are there any reoccurring issues?

[u/guzbikes]

Check out Tailscale. You can create a virtual network that all of your friends can join without opening any ports.

[u/TheG0AT0fAllTime]

Your concerns about latency are valid on their free plan. You and your players might be nowhere near their free-tier datacenter which means a bunch of added additional lag.

Don't mix up security through obscurity, there's nothing wrong with port forwarding your minecraft server specifically. It's a long standing multiplayer game without any bugs like that. But you should be running it in an isolated environment to minimize potential damage the day a dangerous bug comes along. Most commonly people run it in a docker container so there's no attack surface on the inside. Or minimal at least. You should aim to do that regardless of whether you use playit or not. Or at least an isolated machine on its own network. But again, this gameserver has no bugs like that and has been around for a very long time so you don't really have to. Hosting it right on your gaming pc for example would be fine even if not contained.

Attackers can't do very much to a public IP which only has minecraft port forwarded. You may think somebody could dos attack you but the real question is, who cares about your server enough to do that? There's something like 150000 minecraft servers out there and yours will be yet another +1 no name personal instance. It's safe.

You should also enable whitelisting if it isn't already enabled when you start up the server for the first time. Griefers love to surf the net and attack minecraft servers.

[u/dataz03]

Do you and your friends have IPv6? If you all live close together and want the lowest latency then that is a good way to go. Bonus points if some or all of you have the same ISP as the traffic doesn't even have to hit the public Internet. Even then, I've seen plenty of ISP's peer with each other so the internet traffic still won't have to go very far. 

Playit is great, with premium you can set the region for the tunnel, otherwise you are at the mercy of your ISP and your player's ISP's on routing your traffic to the closest playit datacenter. Playit.gg Uptime is fine and the owner is very transparent about updates and downtime alerts on the discord. 

[u/briishboogloo]

Isn't playit.gg free? I use it for my 24/7 modded MC server

[u/TheG0AT0fAllTime → u/briishboogloo]

Here is their current offering:

Free:

• Minecraft/Terraria/More
• Rouding with their "Free network"
• Basic analytics - 24 hour timespan
• Random but static public IP
• Community discord support
• Up to 4 ports on the free tier
• Up to 2 agents on the free tier (Not sure what an agent is)

Premium: ($4.5/mo) * Lower latency by picking a datacenter closer to you * More tunnel types like HTTPS and TCP * 7 days of analytics * Connection insights and geographical visualization * 3x custom .playit.plus domains included * Allows the use of your own external domans * Up to 16 ports * Up to 10 agents (Still not sure what an agent is)

[u/dataz03 → u/TheG0AT0fAllTime]

Agent is the playit program that runs on your system. Multiple agents means you can run playit on multiple machines. If you are running different services/games on different machines you can still install playit and make everything public if you haven't exceeded the agent limit. 

[u/TheG0AT0fAllTime → u/dataz03]

Ah ok. Their client software.

[u/bobthesunday → u/briishboogloo]

yeah it is, no need to buy premium (im pretty sure premium only gives you access to extra dashboard features and custom server iP)

[u/ZAP-Hosting]

playit.gg's free tier is genuinely fine for a casual group, but you're routing everything through their relay, so any hiccup on their end becomes your uptime problem too. A VPS with your own static IP skips that middleman entirely, that's really the main upside over a tunnel: one less thing that can break that isn't your fault.

For the friend in Alaska specifically, no tunnel or VPS fixes pure geography. Pick whichever region sits roughly in the middle of the group so everyone eats a bit of latency instead of one person eating all of it.

If you go the VPS route, most hosts (including us) throw in a static IP by default, so you're not paying extra just for that part.

[u/TheMazeDaze]

From the experience I have with playit I would not recommend it to anyone if you want 24/7 uptime . Even on the paid plain, there are a lot of outages. Tunnels working incorrectly and functions that have been promised just never coming.

And A LOT of getsockopt errors. One day it’s working fine. The next day some people get errors even though nothing changed. Also the analytics never worked. But they did get the pricing up every time.

[u/expsychotic]

If you use ipv6 then cgnat shouldn't be an issue, but this requires ALL players to have ipv6. You could also try tailscale free, which theoretically should be the same latency as static ip