How to make a Minetest Server with free hosting services?

[MineYoshi]

Recently i was looking for some servers to enter and play, many servers are in "ddns", i wonder if someone know how to have a free server with a free hosting service...

[rubenwardy]

Not possible. Any server made with a free hoster will not be reliable of sufficient.
Either use a free trial, get someone to host it for you, or, you know, pay for it yourself.

[MineYoshi]

https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=14402

[rubenwardy]

You do not need duck dns to make a server. Duck dns allows you to refer to your server as domainname.duckdns.com instead of 64.3.21.32.

[Lejo]

You always need a server and that is not gratis. :(
I had for my servers on 1 Cloudserver by 1und1 that is then 5 Euro all mouth.
That's enough CPU for a little server.
But it is Ubuntu not Windows.
Windows is expensive.

[OldCoder]

1. If you're in the U.S., you can get a low-end cloud server, an EC2 Micro Instance, from Amazon AWS free, or close to free, for a year. I'm not sure about the rules for people who are located overseas.

To sign up for a Micro Instance, you'll need to have a credit card. However, if you proceed correctly, the charges should be zero, or close to zero, until the end of the first year. After that, if you don't cancel the service, Amazon will charge you monthly.

The cost for an EC2 Micro Instance after the first year varies, but it might be about $20.00 USD per month. You can get better deals from other companies.

A Micro Instance is too limited for heavy use. If you put a busy or large Minetest world on it, there will be too much lag. However, you could use a server of this type to learn the basics.

2. You can also host a Minetest world from home. Many people do this, but it is not recommended except for testing purposes.

Residential Internet connections are too slow and unreliable, especially in the outbound direction. Visitors will see lag. Additionally, if you do this, some ISPs may try to charge you extra or cancel your service.

If you'd like to try this, regardless, the key steps are as follows:

(a) Register a domain name with Namecheap or a similar company. This will cost you about $10.00 to $15.00 per year.

(b) Set up Dynamic DNS. This is a service where some company agrees to point your domain name to your home router. It may be free, but there may be a "catch".

(c) Set up port forwarding. The details will depend on the type of router that you have.

3. The best thing to do is to look for a good deal on a cloud server costing from $10.00 to $25.00 USD per month. For busy or large servers, you may need better hardware and that will cost more.

You can get low-end servers for as little as $5.00 to $10.00 USD per month. However, the hardware on servers in that price range will usually not be very good.