Hello there. I am thinking of buying some components and building my own dedicated server which I will have in my home. This server will run various programs, as well as Minecraft servers. Now, these Minecraft servers are servers that I will be playing in with my friends, so even if my IP gets exposed, it won’t be a big issue.
Of course, when telling others to join, you could give them your IP, or you could buy a domain and link it to your IP. This is something that I am thinking of doing, but I do not like the idea of having a domain name linked directly to my home IP as someone could use it to track my home IP.
This is where reverse proxies come in place. I don’t know much of it, but I heard that reverse proxies are, like their name, reverse proxies, they take traffic and redirect it to the server, and vise versa, while masking the destination IP. This would be ideal for my use case, but my question to you is if this is even possible. Is it possible to set up a reverse proxy so that my URL directs to the proxy, and then the proxy directs to the server? Is it possible to mask my home IP address using a reverse proxy, or will it still be visible? If I were to implement a reverse proxy, would it cause any issues when hosting websites or Minecraft servers?
I unfortunately do not know that much about reverse proxies and home servers, which is why I am asking here. Although this isn’t part of my original questions, and you by no means need to answer it, could I also ask what the cost of having a reverse proxy might be (since you have to externally host it)? That is all. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Thank you for your time and help, they are truly appreciated.
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Reverse proxies (when self hosted) are totally free to use but you’ll still need to pay an annual fee to a domain registrar (like cloudflare for example) to register your domain (ex. Mysite.com or whatever) and then it’s as easy as creating subdomains for whatever internal services you want to expose to your friends (ex. Steam.mysite.com) so those folks with the link to your subdomain can access ONLY specific applications on your home server.
DM me, happy to walk you through it in detail if you need more help.
Thank you for the information and your initiative or help. I’ll see how it goes with an active discussion I am having right now and will DM you if I decide to implement it. Thanks!
Reverse proxies are generally used for HTTP/Web services, but I think that nginx can proxy tcp connections as well, however I’ve never used this functionality. You could possibly also take advantage of cloudflare tunnels
I made an article a while back specifically on setting this up with websites. Could definitely use it for your server.
https://www.itspixelperfect.ca/2023/02/10/the-ultimate-guide-to-setting-up-a-reverse-proxy/
I’ll read it as soon as I can. Thank you!
Look at cosmos-server. It has a reverse proxy built in that also does rate limiting and bot prevention
Or Cloudflare tunnels.
I’ll look into both. Thank you!
Not exactly what you want, but unless you want to open a new port to each service on your local network, you will need to install some kind of reverse proxy for yourself that maps yoursub.domain.com to the internal service. A virtual machine or container.
It seems like a reverse proxy will be needed regardless for registering sub-domains. Thanks!