- Port forwarding can be a great tool in the right hands, as it can unlock your private home network in a wide variety of ways.
- In this article, we’ll teach you three things about this procedure: what is port forwarding, is it secure, and how to do it without compromising your network.
- If you want to forward ports while using a VPN, make sure you are using a VPN service that supports port forwarding.
- Visit our Network & Internet Hub to learn more about how to manage your network effectively.
Port forwarding can be a great tool in the right hands, as it can unlock your private home network in a wide variety of ways. With this technique, you can enable external access to your network devices.
However, it can be risky if you don’t know what you are doing. So you will need to understand three things: what is port forwarding, is it secure, and how to do this without compromising your network. We will tell you all about it.
What is port forwarding?
The explanation is quite technical, but we will try to simplify it. If you access the Internet through a router on your network, you will need to forward ports so that external traffic can access your network.
For example, if you want to host a public game server, you will need to open some ports on your network, so that other players (clients) who are not on your LAN (Local Area Network) can connect to it.
Since your router is configured by default to not allow external connections, you will need to perform these operations manually. Your router acts as a firewall and only allows access to some services.
Essentially, port forwarding allows external devices to connect to a certain device or service within a private LAN.
Is port forwarding safe?
The short answer is yes; port forwarding is not inherently insecure. The safety of this procedure depends on a variety of factors. For example, if you run an unsupported service with many unpatched vulnerabilities, then you are putting your PC and your network at risk.
On the other hand, if you only want to host a public game server, you should be fine. However, you need to make sure that no other software / service acquires the ports you previously assigned as long as the game server is down.
You can increase your security by setting restrictions. For example, you can limit traffic by country or even by IP address (whitelist). Also, it would be a good practice to limit the bandwidth, so that you do not receive DDoS attacks.
The bottom line is that port forwarding is not inherently insecure as long as you are careful what goes through those ports. Last but not least, one of the safest practices would be to close the port when you are not using it.
Assuming you know what you’re doing and the risks involved, let’s see how to open ports on your router. Performing this operation is different from router to router.
For obvious reasons, we will not show you how to do this on every router. Instead, we’ll give you the insights, so you can manage in any situation, with any router.
If you can access your device / service from outside your network, you have likely managed to forward your port. Alternatively, you can use an online checker, as we’ve described in our previous guide.
