Meet Basalt: game servers on your own hardware, without the hassle
Why we built a self-hosted panel for game servers, and what it does for you on day one.
Running a game server for your friends has always involved a choice between two bad options.
Option one: rent from a hosting company. It works, but you pay every month for hardware weaker than the PC in your closet, and the moment your friends want mods, more RAM or a second server, the bill grows.
Option two: self-host. Now the hardware is yours and free, but so is the ops work. You are the one SSH-ing in at midnight because the server crashed, explaining port forwarding to your router, and being the single person who knows how anything works.
Basalt exists to make option two feel like option one. You keep your hardware, your worlds and your data; Basalt adds the panel on top.
Panel overview screencast
Dashboard with a running Minecraft instance
light + dark variants
What you get
- Deploy from templates. Pick Minecraft or Hytale, fill in a settings form, and Basalt runs the right Docker container with the right flags. No Dockerfile knowledge required.
- A live console, in the browser. Logs stream in real time and commands go straight to the server. Your moderator friend never needs SSH.
- Files, backups and schedules. Browse the server's files, archive the world before a risky mod install, and let backup policies handle the routine.
- Public access without port forwarding. Built-in frp tunnels give your server a public address even behind CGNAT, through a tunnel server you run yourself.
- Real access control. Users, roles and per-resource permissions mean you can hand out exactly the access each person needs, whether that's two friends or a whole team.
Who it's for
The same panel scales from a Raspberry Pi in a dorm room to a rack shared by a studio. The free tier covers the friends-server case: 2 user seats, 2 instance seats and 1 node. Hobby and Pay as you go raise the limits when a community or company outgrows them.
Get started
Basalt ships as Docker containers. If you have Docker installed, you are one compose file away:
docker compose up -dThe installation guide walks through the full setup, including secrets and first login. If you hit anything rough, tell us on GitHub; this is exactly the feedback we want right now.