Baby's first self hosting

I'd like to think everyone remembers the first thing they self-hosted. For some people, it might have been a janky website, NAS to store 1 file or some kind of DNS ad-blocker (à la Pihole). Mostly un-serious but always the first toe in the water. For me, you have to look WAY back to 2010 (Ow, my back).

Minecraft was quickly becoming a thing and for those without the monetary backing to buy the pre-alpha copy, you played the online version. You could certainly play on the 'massive' 256x256x64 block world map by yourself but certainly no fun without friends. I always considered myself to be techy even at the ripe age of 16, so I dived straight into the wold of 'Game server hosting'. It didn't take much to run; forward port 25565 through the family router, run the bat you download from the Minecraft website and boom: why can't I hold all these virtual blocks. Nothing technical about it but to my friends and myself, this was otherworldly. Sure, the server went down when I needed to switch my computer off, but for the 6 of us, it was all we needed.

To this day, I've always tested my networking setups with a Minecraft server. Funny how some stuff doesn't change!

(Apparently you can still play a very similar version now! https://classic.minecraft.net/)