I recently have been building a Minecraft server for fun, and running it off of my computer. Now I want friends and other players to be able to join it.
Naturally, I port forwarded and turned off router IPv4 firewall. But, it turns out my ISP is blocking the ports I need (25565) to be forwarded to me! Am I screwed, or is there a way to safely bypass this?
One way around this situation is to change the port that your server is on (somewhere in the server.properties), change it to something like 25566, or a port that isn't blocked.
Your friends will have to add the port to the end of it (like myserverdomain:25566), or you can make an alias (through a free service like noip) to use the port, so when you navigate to myaliasdomain, it will redirect you to myserverdomain:25566.
I've done this before, and it worked well, although the free alias options are limited to certain base domains, so you may need to pay money if you want something nice.
Note, ISP's don't usually block port 25565. Are you sure your router has been port-forwarded correctly?
EDIT: More Information:
The port is not locked to 25565, you can change it, and in this case, you'll have to. I can walk you through it if you need, we can chat about it, let me know.
The only places you have to change it is:
For the clients, you can either:
Personally, I decided to combine both the 2nd and 3rd option for changing IP. I make one alias to my ip, and another that points to my previous alias but with the port attached to the end. So I did mydomain.org = 123.456.789.123, then myminecraftserver.org = mydomain.org:25566. This way, when my external IP changes, I can just change mydomain.org, as well as the possibility of a webserver, ssh server, or other services using mydomain.org.
The problem I alluded to before is, using a direct IP in your minecraft clients is very unreliable. Your ISP will change your external IP every so often, and once that happens, all your clients will no longer see your server as online. When using a dynamic domain name service, you can update your domain (mydomain.org) to your changed IP whenever it changes, and just give all your clients the domain. That way, they just use mydomain.org or mydomain.org:25566, which is easier to type and remember, and your clients will stay connected when your external IP changes.
If you're looking for a free dynamic hosting service to get your own personal "mydomain.org", I would suggest the "NoIP" company. Search them on Google. They are free to use as long as you verify your domain is still being used every 30 days.
