This topic

Self-hosting on BT home broadband???

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 22:17:13 GMT

Hello I'm Ashley, and I use BT Home broadband and my downloads are 900mbps and uploads are 110mbps. (using own routers)

I have tried looking thru BT terms and couldn't find any information about BT usage or policy or whatever its called.

And I was wondering if you are allowed to self host your own public servers on your home broadband connection.

As I was planning to setup my own Minecraft server network that I want to have a few hundred players playing on it in the future. And I was going use a reversed proxy on TCP shield to prevent ddos attacks and to protect against hackers.

Anyways is this allowed? I dont see why it wouldn't be but there mixed information online about different ISP's so I don't know.

Re: Self-hosting on BT home broadband???

Madpeter — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 05:39:59 GMT

https://www.bt.com/terms/bt-home-phone-broadband-terms-conditions

11. When we may restrict, suspend or end a service

of note:

x. Your usage is significantly different to what we'd expect from the average customer.

xii. You use a service for any trade, business or profession.

seems to run into these rules

Re: Self-hosting on BT home broadband???

ptrduffy — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 09:31:09 GMT

There are really two questions here:

Can your connection support this use-case
Will BT take any action against it

On the first question, with "a few hundred players", you could be hitting up against the bandwidth you have available. The key figure here is the 110 Mb/s upload figure, as that is what your server has available to send updates to clients. It depends heavily on things like mods you have installed and player behaviour, but estimates I've seen range from 50 kb/s to 0.5 Mb/s per user - at the top end of this, with a few hundred users you are starting to use up all your upload bandwidth.

As for the second question, if you are using up all your upload bandwidth for a reasonable chunk of time, then it is possible that BT would say you are in breach of the T&Cs as posted by @Madpeter - whether this actually happens depends on a number of things: how busy your local PON is, whether other users on the PON complain about poor performance, how much BT can be bothered to investigate those performance complaints and so on.

I would suggest you try it with a much smaller number of users (a few 10s as opposed to 100s) and measure the bandwidth usage over a period of time. Then you'll be in a far better position to know how close you'll be coming to limitations, impact on other PON users, and likelihood of unwanted attention from BT.

Re: Self-hosting on BT home broadband???

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:00:15 GMT

Does this still apply for if the fibre connection is connected directly to the Local BT Exchange?

as shown in this picture - https://www.bt.com/content/dam/bt/storefront/broadband/full-fibre/full-fibre-connection-diagram_Desktop.jpg

Re: Self-hosting on BT home broadband???

licquorice — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:15:24 GMT

Yes