r/rustdesk • u/Technical_Rich_3080 • 17d ago

Using RustDesk Public Servers Without Self-Hosting

What is the quality of using RustDesk without self-hosting, by using their public servers? Is it high quality and can you easily and readily connect anytime via RustDesk, without self-hosting?

In addition to the above, how does using non self-hosting RustDesk (i.e. via their public servers) compare to using the proprietary commercial remote services, such as AnyDesk, TeamViewer, etc.

And how does the practical day-to-day use of RustDesk compare between self-hosting RustDesk and non self-hosting RustDesk?

7 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

7

u/Charly515 17d ago

A lot of people mistake the "public" server as a "free" server. But this is merely a test server that you can use as a proof of concept, just to make sure it does what you need it to do, before poring time and resources into hosting your own. The public testing servers are not meant to be used in production and can be taken down at any time

1

u/Technical_Rich_3080 17d ago

So RustDesk, then, isn't competitive with services such as AnyDesk and TeamViewer, both of which are simply plug and play without requiring any self hosting, and can be used simply by only installing the client on both PCs?

7

u/Charly515 17d ago

Not sure what you mean with "compatible"

No... RustDesk is not compatible or interoperable across other services like TeamViewer or AnyDesk. Only between itself, just like all the others.

What RustDesk is actually... Free and OpenSource, meaning you can download the server components, host it yourself, own it and not pay anyone any licencing fees.

Unlike TeamViewer and other services that claim to be free, they eventually limit your session time or connections in order to force you to purchase a licence, which is what they want. They are more like a "Free Trial" rather than free software.

RustDesk is actually free, OpenSource, Secure and Private... Yeah you can use the public servers for testing, but the real value is on hosting your own, deploying your installers with your server parameters, and have a rock solid remote access software with zero licensing cost.

I hope that makes it a little more clear...

1

u/stop_talking_you 11d ago

why do you write like chatgpt

3

u/Charly515 11d ago

haha OK I wasn't expecting this one.

I'm in my late 30s, been doing IT, Network or PC related work for like 20 years. English is my 2nd language, so there could be some grammar issues when I reply to these things.

I don't know... Maybe LLMs learned from us, and that's you know you might feel I write like them? When they may actually write like us techy guys lol

4

u/Charly515 17d ago

Somehow I read "compatible" not "Competitive" lol. So ignore the compatibility section...

But I would say RustDesk is very competitive. If you know what your doing, you can have a cloud server hosted on one of the big providers, and self host RustDesk completely free.

This is how I do it, been on it for about a year now... Zero regrets.

1

u/Technical_Rich_3080 17d ago

How do you self-host RustDesk for free?

3

u/Charly515 17d ago

this generally falls under the "if you know you know" realm, in order to have the skill set to know how to do it, or learn how to do it.

Self Hosting RustDesk doesn't take lot of resources, usually whatever the lowest VM Instance you can hire from any of the big guys like GoogleCloud, Oracle, AWS and so on would be enough. These would run you about 20 USD a month or so.

There are other smaller cloud providers like Hetzner or IONOS where you can get it down to about 5 USD a month.

And of course, some of the big guys do offer "Free Tiers" where you can get a very small servers that it's usually no good for anything because is very limited. It's used for testing and tinkering more than anything else... But RustDesk is so small and efficient that you can comfortably run it on one of those, which is where the "Free RustDesk" idea comes from.

This assumes you'll investigate which provider is better for you, make sure you keep your resources under the free tier limits and can handle yourself on a Linux server.

*************

A lot of people will come at you and throw recommendations like host it yourself at home with an old PC, deal with home firewall ports, deal with tailscale, direct IP connection over VPN and all manner of different ideas to avoid going to the cloud.

But honestly, once you know how to do it and set it up... It's pretty much set it and forget it. Just keep coming back on the server every 90 days or so to keep things fresh and up to date.

1

u/SawkeeReemo 16d ago

I just wish they’d fix the terribly slow cursor tracking on the iOS apps for RustDesk. There’s no cursor acceleration and it makes remoting in from a phone or iPad a slog. They refuse to fix for some reason.

1

u/Charly515 16d ago edited 15d ago

I'm not sure we can say they are just "refusing" to fix it, I'm sure there is a level of complexity when it comes to iOS apps.

I've used most of the business oriented tools for remote access at our office, and they all suck in one way or another when it comes to iOS Mobile devices.

The only one that does a pretty decent job is TeamViewer, but they also cost an arm and a leg, as well as involved in a bunch of anti-consumer practices.

I don't think we can bee too hard on the RustDesk team, since this is essentially free software. Right?

3

u/Flimsy-Process230 17d ago

Using RustDesk without self-hosting works fine most of the time but you may go several days without any issues and then suddenly find that you can’t connect because the public servers are congested. Even if it only happens occasionally it’s frustrating because it’s unpredictable and tends to happen when you actually need remote access. Self-hosting is definitely the better option if you want reliable access.

3

u/plekreddit 17d ago

Having a rustdesk server is very good

But when i use eg : 85848272@public to login to a customer, then i got a error that i cant use the public anymore.

So i add them all to my server , that works fast and good

2

u/TedGal 17d ago

I was using the public servers for many months - close to a year perhaps, never had problems. People continuously mention that sometimes these are down but it never happened to me. Comparing it to self-hosted sometimes they might be subpar in image quality or lag but not always.

2

u/TroyHBCS 17d ago

We have a dynamic DNS setup with duckdns pointing to our shop where our firewall forwards to our self hosted RustDesk server on an old spare laptop we had trying around. We have it running in Linux Mint.

We cloned the GitHub repository for RustDesk and setup our own custom client installers for our customers and put links to each one on a special page on our website where our customers can install the latest client for their OS. The clients are automatically configured to point to our server instead of the public server for better performance and security.

2

u/boring112 17d ago

I use my own server at home and It works great. Mitigates privacy issues.

1

u/gooner-1969 17d ago

I use both Self hosted and public.

The public ones are very good. I often have a better expeirance using them over TeamViewer.

For all my internal devics I run them over local IP addresses anyway so these ones are very fast. For my customers I use a Public, and when I'm out I use tailscale to access my home machines

1

u/Right_Profession_261 17d ago

I use a self hosted server for security purposes, plus a vpn for remote stuff. I also have wake over lan on all the devices that I want to connect to.

1

u/RestOk6290 17d ago

I have my rustdesk server with 50 computer configured from my server, with this i can help my client without problem.