I thought self-hosting requires, like, paid ownership of a website or something. I don’t think I’ve ever self-hosted before and am lost with its guide.
My primary concern is RustDesk’s warning about possibly shutting down its free self-hosting because of bot abuse, despite now requiring GitHub accounts. There seems to be nothing even remotely close to RustDesk, except possibly HopToDesk, which I heard is a fork of an older version or something.
It’d be nice to be able to keep this going just in case. Or are there free, E2EE servers out there that anyone knows of?
Yes, that’s one of the options they present on their site.
Which features do you use?
I mainly used it to connect to machines using SSH, RDP and for port-forwarding.
Now I am using Netbird and am able to perform these actions.
I’m just a simpleton helping a couple of boomers periodically navigate their own computers and install software. We’re not even 10% as complex as what it sounds like you’re doing, haha. That is cool, though; I hadn’t heard of Netbird.
My recommendation to many newcomers:
Setup Yunohost, which gives you a custom Debian-based OS that’s easy to deploy tested builds, like Rustdesk. You can configure your Domain info, DNS, etc pretty easily, and if you decide, a dynamic domain or Porkbun (cuz is cheap plus free private WHOIS and SSL certs).
Yes, a small learning curve, but easier than building from Docker when you know nothing about Docker nor have the time to learn. I can fumble through a UI, I can’t fumble with commands or code that I don’t instinctively know. Others who day “just take the time to learn Docker”… But I’ve got 2 jobs, kids and their activities, pets, and other hobbies, so not much time for other stuff.
There is also motivation and energy from other severely draining, external problems. Thanks, I had never heard of Yunohost before.
100 percent agree. Yunohost or runtipi are easy ways to get into hosting
I host rustdesk on my own domain and it works. I don’t have my tinfoil hat all the way on though.
You can get a free subdomain from https://desec.io/ so maybe that could help? I did that for a while before buying a cheap domain. You’ll get something like stuff.dedyn.io
IP/Name: 30p87.de Key: YfXqz85PRidZ0NwMj3SAkFk5wypJPofTInbae9+mb1I=All default setting, relay and server, free version.
I’m not familiar with what’s been said or done regarding bots, but I’d be surprised if they were planning to shutdown the self-hosting part? But I can see how they might shutdown the free cloud auth aspect.
As RD consists of the server/client software and the authentication software, the latter is also made available online to all with no reliability promises. But there’s nothing stopping people from hosting both parts locally, and is how I implemented it. No traffic to third parties, etc.
Can’t advise on domain-based setup, as I’ve not tried it, but depending on how you’re planning to use it, there may be no need for a domain. I only used mine locally (or via WireGuard when outside), with hbbr and hbbs hosted in Docker on my NAS, and it worked fine with my mobile devices and PCs.
I have not set it up yet but plan to do so soon. I could imagine a requirement of owning a host name so that you can have a certificate, but I imagine an IP address would work just as well. You will need to open ports on your router according to the documentation; I haven’t looked into reverse proxy options or anything to prevent the firewall changes being necessary.
But yeah, my understanding is it’s totally doable for “free” (i.e. using your existing infrastructure).
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VPN Virtual Private Network
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #275 for this comm, first seen 6th May 2026, 19:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Just set up DynDNS an host rustdesk on docker. It requires two docker containers, exchanging secret keys and opening firewall ports
