Would improving the NATed VM experience lead to you wanting to have a NATed IPv4?

sive

I know certain aspects like IP reputation, default ports for certain protocols or otherwise make a dedicated IPv4 a priority for most VPS users. Yet I think that many things con solve a lot of these issues like a reverse proxy.

Additionally I feel that configuring the allocated forwarded ports is often a pain where going to your providers ticketing system is slow to get the desired changes so I’d definitely want to use an interface. Where allocated forwarded ports I can configure destination port with immediate changes.

And assuming of course that a dedicated IPv6 or /64 is given to the VM you can still use default ports for people without legacy hardware or ISPs.

Calin

I'm sell in the past NATs VPS , it's just a hell

sive

@Calin said:
I'm sell in the past NATs VPS , it's just a hell

Yeah I can imagine it could be confusing without good documentation or tutorials. I think having a good page on the VM config settings to port forward could help as well.

matey0

Port forwarding settings in the dashboard are commonplace I think.
Some ideas that just came up to me:

• Allow users to order with specific reserved service ports (like 53, game server ports) for some extra money
• Proxy port 80 and 443 to customers based on host name (users submit their domain name). For 443 users would have to submit their TLS keys, which some may be uncomfortable with (or maybe you could bypass it by looking at SNI, which is unencrypted?).
• Enable dynamic port forwarding via UPnP

I think with those covered NAT would be an option for more people.

sive

@matey0 said:
Port forwarding settings in the dashboard are commonplace I think.
Some ideas that just came up to me:

• Allow users to order with specific reserved service ports (like 53, game server ports) for some extra money
• Proxy port 80 and 443 to customers based on host name (users submit their domain name). For 443 users would have to submit their TLS keys, which some may be uncomfortable with.
• Enable dynamic port forwarding via UPnP

I think with those covered NAT would be an option for more people.

I’m working on a managed reverse proxy / load balancer as a part of a team. I could definitely have an integration as well as managing their Certs from a 3rd party cert provider on their behalf. That would definitely help out people who would need web servers and if it could integrate easily in the VM interface it would make it very usable.

UPnP I’d have to consider how I’d implement. It seems like a security risk.

An alternative I have come up with is a managed load balancer service traditional cloud providers offer in order to get a dedicated IP that’s easily shared across VM instances. Since it’s just internal networking and you can provision instances of a load balancer app like NGINX providers can probably provision load balancers for the same cost as a public IPv4

shruub

I really like Neoon's microlxc, clean interface and has got everything that's needed - but suppose, dealing with unknowing customers really suck. But idk, I generally just like having control of my full (virtual-) server.