24/05/2026 10:25 pm
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Ive been playing Captain Claw since like 1998, total classic. Recently got into the OpenClaw project and its amazing how much better it runs on modern hardware compared to the original Monolith engine. Ive successfully compiled it on my Linux box and messed around with the local settings. Usually, Im pretty good with networking stuff - port forwarding, DDNS, the whole nine yards. But my current ISP has this annoying CGNAT situation so I cant just host it from my home IP anymore. Its a real pain in the neck because I was planning a little mini-tournament for three of my high school buddies this Saturday afternoon and I really dont want to let them down over a silly technicality.
I tried looking at some of the standard free tier cloud stuff but most of them are too restrictive. AWS Free Tier is too much of a headache for a one-off thing and I dont want to accidentally get billed for egress. I tried some of those free Discord bot hosting sites but they seem to only allow port 80/443 or specific webhooks. OpenClaw needs a bit more flexibility with its networking stack for the multiplayer relay to actually function. Are there any actual free hosting services left that play nice with OpenClaw multiplayer? Ideally something that doesnt mind a few non-standard ports or can handle the low-latency traffic without a huge hassle...
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24/05/2026 10:25 pm
Man, CGNAT is the absolute worst for hosting games. I dealt with that for a year and it basically killed my ability to host anything until I figured out a workaround. Honestly, for a free VPS that actually gives you control over ports and a dedicated public IP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Free Tier is your best bet by a mile. You get their Always Free ARM instances which are actually surprisingly beefy compared to what AWS offers on their trial. You get up to 24GB of RAM which is massive overkill for OpenClaw, but the important part is you can open up the ingress rules in their dashboard for whatever ports you need. If you dont want to mess with a server at all and just want to get your buddies connected for Saturday, you could also look at Tailscale Mesh VPN. Since youre just playing with three people, everyone installs the client, and it puts you all on a virtual LAN. It punches through CGNAT like its not even there. I use it for my private game servers and the latency is basically negligible since its point-to-point. Both work, but the Oracle route is cleaner if you want a dedicated host. Let me know if you hit a wall with the Oracle security lists, they can be a bit finicky the first time you see them... just gotta remember to open the ports in both the web console and the OS firewall.
