Hi all :)

I’ve been playing Minecraft with the family, and running a local PaperMC server for a while now, and last year set up an online server with the Oracle free tier. I’ve had a load of failed login attempts recently, and the server crashed. I don’t know if they were related, but it made me realise that I’ve missed a few steps during the setup.

I have a domain that points to the server through Cloudflare, so it’s easier to share, and I’ve got a whitelist / allowlist of Minecraft users to keep it private. My thinking is that this is what I want:

Domain name through Cloudflare to stop things like DDoS attacks, and to have https certificates (might need LetsEncrypt too?).

PaperMC server running on an Ubuntu server on Oracle’s free tier. 2 cores and 10GB RAM should be enough for less than a dozen players.

Pterodactyl control panel to manage the server through a GUI from anywhere.

Firewall / block to stop connections from outside the UK. Hopefully that should restrict bots and malicious login attempts.

I’ve got a handful of plugins that I use, like Geyser / Floodgate and ViaVersion so the kids can log in from any client, and Dynmap so I can view the map and help them out if needs be. I’ve got CoreProtect and ServerBackup too. I’ve got OpenAudioMC so that the kids can speak to each other without putting them on something open like Discord, as they’re too young for that.

I’m looking into AutoPlug at the moment to keep the plugins up to date, but I don’t know if it runs with Pterodactyl or not.

Am I missing anything obvious? I’m happy with the gameplay side of things for now, but I could do with some advice on keeping everything secure.

Thanks in advance :)