stun.stunprotocol.org is moving to a new address

[John Selbie]

TLDR: stun.stunprotocol.org is going away. Being replaced with a new server and address.

In the past several months, there has been an 8x increase in traffic to/from stun.stunprotocol.org.  What was approximately 200M STUN binding responses per day grew to be 1.5 billion responses per day. And this is after the flood blocking code did its job.  I'm really proud that this little linux server running my code can hold that load.  But...

Bandwidth at this scale is not free.  In years prior to this, the stunserver was nearly free for me to host. Then as popularity in voip and webrtc came about, the bandwidth costs made it a few hundred dollars a year. Then last year it was more closer to a thousand dollars.  If I keep things going without any intervention, bandwidth costs will exceed $4000 this year.  This is not sustainable.

I believe there has been a combination of denial of service attacks and some popular open source services that have hardcoded stun.stunprotocol.org as the default. And on or around Christmas of this past year, something took the usage to another order of magnitude.

Barring a miracle that I find the root cause and have it addressed, the only solution is to turn off the stun.stunprotocol.org address.  It's already been turned off globally except for North America and Europe.  And by the end of this week, it will be decommissioned completely.

But rest assured, the public stun server is not going away. It's simply getting a new IP address and DNS address.  if you need a STUN server for personal use, local testing, or single-device deployments, you can get the new stun server address off the code's website. But I do ask: the server is not for your application's production deployment. If you need to deploy something at scale, please host your own server. It's open source code and is easy to setup. The Stuntman STUN code will continue to be open source and maintained on Github.

Stuntman is still the best STUN soluion on the Internet. And I happy to maintain the code and service. Stuntman powers millions of VOIP, P2P, and WebRTC connections daily. And apparently, the Pro-Evolution Soccer 6 community too. :)

Anyway, for more details of the new server and access to the code, head over to www.stunprotocol.org