What is playit.gg?
playit.gg is a networking service that make it possible to host game servers at home that anyone across the world can join. We do this through our custom tunneling software. You can find our opensource client here. When you launch the playit program, the program will connect to our Anycast Network and assign you a static IP and port. You can then share your static IP and port with friends. When they connect, their connection information will go to the nearest tunnel server and be tunneled to the playit program running on your computer. By tunneling the connection, your friend is able to connect to the server running within your network.
What is an Anycast Network?
An Anycast Network is a network where all of our IP addresses are available at all of our datacenters. When you or a player tries to communicate with a playit tunnel server, your ISP will route your connection to what they consider is the closet datacenter we operate in. ISPs don't always get this right so we're actively working of a new ways to improve this.
Anycast offers us a large number of advantages. Here are a few:
- We can dynamically add more servers to handle load
- We can use our limited IP space across many datacenters
- Tunnel servers can be upgraded without downtime
- An entire datacenter can go down and your connections will not be disrupted