Briggs Softworks

Where are some good cheap places to host a server in the cloud with security and firewall builtin?

I use atlantic.net to host the official Poker Mavens demo site. Their cheapest Windows cloud server is about $15 USD per month.

You can use Cloudflare for DDOS protection. They have a free account option. See the pinned thread on Cloudflare at the top of this section.

Kent Briggs wrote:I use atlantic.net to host the official Poker Mavens demo site. Their cheapest Windows cloud server is about $15 USD per month.

You can use Cloudflare for DDOS protection. They have a free account option. See the pinned thread on Cloudflare at the top of this section.

Thanks

BuyVM is a good option - very reliable. I have no affiliation but they have a stellar rep.

I use Interserver.net to host my Poker Mavens. 2xvcpu, 4 GB RAM and 60 GB SSD, and Windows 2016 licensing included for $20/month. I have been hosting games here for a week now with no issues with either the connectivity or compute resources.

They do not, however, have DDoS or edge firewall. You have to use the Windows firewall. The server comes with RDP Defender pre-installed. That is a must have for a server out in the wild like that.

naked_eskimo wrote:I use Interserver.net to host my Poker Mavens. 2xvcpu, 4 GB RAM and 60 GB SSD, and Windows 2016 licensing included for $20/month. I have been hosting games here for a week now with no issues with either the connectivity or compute resources.

They do not, however, have DDoS or edge firewall. You have to use the Windows firewall. The server comes with RDP Defender pre-installed. That is a must have for a server out in the wild like that.

Thanks so much for pointing there. I have reserved the same profile machine in anticipation of hosting our Mavens instance there.

Do you recommend any additional config to help secure the server?

RDP Defender comes pre-installed. There are other options like RDPguard that do the same task but with some added features. Rdpguard has a cloud ip block option that is pretty cool. It creates a database of blocked ip addresses from other installations and allows you to also block all of those in bulk. Pretty cool, but costs $80

Otherwise, some things you may want to look at:

Disable default administrator account ( be sure to create a different one before doing this so you don't lock yourself out. If you plan on doing this, then install Poker Mavens under the new account as it makes use of default user paths for the data folder.

Use strong passwords

Monitor your event log. There are a few places to look for failed logon attemps and rdp connections. A quick google should lead you to some decent articles about how to do this.

If you have a Pro license and a domain name, then using TLS encryption is a good thing to do and pretty easy to set up.

Also, you may wish to change the default port for rdp. 3389 will be constantly targeted by bots looking to get on your server console. Changing the listening port can help with that:

https://www.accuwebhosting.com/blog/how ... ed-access/

Good advice. Worth it to reinstall as a different account to avoid the Administrator?

Definitely using TLS already.

I will change the RDP port as well, another good idea.

If you do disable the default administrator account, and you have already installed poker mavens using that account, then you would have to uninstall and re-install, I would think. You can ask Kent what the best option is there. But the software is going to have a no longer valid data folder path, for one.