Preventing the Host IP address from being pinged or seen publicly?

[iUsethisWebsite]

Hey, I'm trying to self-host a Minecraft server and I want to prevent people from putting the public IP (ex. minecraftserver.net) into command prompt and getting the actual IP (ex. 10.0.0.1). Is there any way to do this? Sorry if I posted this in the wrong section.

Thanks 🙂

[PL281]

@iUsethisWebsite 

You would need to use a Proxy DNS service - perhaps CloudFlare - the biggest issue with self hosted is if you IP address ever changes

[iUsethisWebsite]

So using cloudflare i’ll be able to turn my REAL IP into an IP made by cloudflare, and use the cloudflare IP for the domain? And the CloudFlare IP will still be able to let people join a minecraft server? (Basically it needs to be port forwarded and open) Also, I can make the IP static so the changing isn’t an issue.

[PL281 · Accepted solution]

@iUsethisWebsite 

Cloudflare is a caching service (which you can set to bypass) which masks the actual IP address of the server. So you would put in your public IP in CloudFlare but if someone did a DNS lookup or ping it would be hitting CloudFlare.

The port forwarding / etc is setup at your network level not the domain level

[iUsethisWebsite]

Sounds perfect. What area of Cloudflare would I use to achieve this? There's many on their website. Sorry if this is a stupid question. 

EDIT: I found what I was looking for on their site, thanks for the help! 🙂