quilkin VS nakama

Quilkin should work for this. Set up one client on your VPS, then set up a second client on a host somewhere inside your network. Connect both instances together and have the host on your network forward traffic to the 27016 endpoint

The firewall would need to be able to handle all the DDoS traffic as well, since your current idea would still pass the game server's IP back to a client. This is doable if you're hosting on a cloud provider and let their firewalls filter the traffic before hitting the game server.

Embark Studios recently open sourced (in alpha) a UDP proxy[1] designed for games that lets you implement a load balancing layer. This allows you to remove servers in the load balancing layer in the event that it comes under attack, allowing the game server to stay up and only having to disconnect a portion of players connected to the attacked loadbalancer. Having a proxy layer is also how Steam protects game servers using the Steam Datagram Relay[2].

[1]: https://github.com/googleforgames/quilkin

nakama: https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama

To add more detail on the recent work on the ZHeap storage engine. We (Heroic Labs) sponsored work for the Cybertec team to bring it up to date with latest improvements and changes with Postgres' pluggable storage engine:

you can do that, but for what platform? html5? windows? android?, the most easiest way is use firestore a service from firebase (offer a free tier), it is the easiest way not the better, other way is use a service like nakama that is more professional and something in the middle can be mmm pocketbase or supabase.

I recommend the backend solution called Nakama since you’re using Godot: https://heroiclabs.com/

You could create all this yourself, or you can use existing solutions which handle all this (and much more I didn't mention). One that I'm aware of that works with Godot is Nakama. They have a paid hosting option, or you can host the application yourself.

I read using nakama server for this is convinient. https://heroiclabs.com/

Does anyone have recommendations on what to use? I've done a bit of research and found https://heroiclabs.com/. It's a bit unclear to me if it actually supports server side state because it talks about 'hosts' a bit, but I think it does...and it seems like you can host it yourself to avoid the $600 a MONTH! pricetag. But any other recommendations? Has anyone used heroic before?

You might be interested in Nakama server from https://heroiclabs.com/

Depending on how much effort you want to put in to this, you might consider something like Nakama: https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama

There have been mentions of Normcore, Fish-Net, and Nakama as well.