Commercial remote desktop tools route your session through their infrastructure, price per technician, and lock features behind tiers. RustDesk does the same job through a relay you own: the connection is end to end encrypted and the traffic passes through your server, not a vendor’s.
What you get
- No third-party relay. Sessions pass through your server only
- End-to-end encrypted, with clients pinned to your server’s public key
- Clients for every desktop platform, and no per-seat pricing
- Light: about 512 MB of memory and 2 GB of disk
Get it running
Pick a VPS with good connectivity
Resources are modest, but this is a relay: what matters is bandwidth and latency between you and the machines you connect to. Choose an offshore VPS in a sensible location for both ends.
Install it in one click
Install RustDesk from the catalog. It runs the relay and ID services rather than a website, so there is no hostname or certificate step. See how one-click installs work.
Point your clients at your server
Configure each RustDesk client with your server address and its public key. The key is what stops a client from being tricked into using someone else’s relay, so treat it as part of the setup rather than an optional field.
Set strong access on every endpoint
Give each machine a permanent password you generated, rather than relying on the short rotating code, and only where unattended access is genuinely needed.
RustDesk needs a range of TCP and UDP ports for ID, relay and hole punching, which is why it is one of the two catalog entries with no Tor mirror and no HTTPS certificate. Open exactly those ports in the firewall, nothing wider, and remember the relay is reachable at your server address rather than behind a proxy.
A machine with a saved permanent password can be reached by anyone who has that password, at any time, with no one present to approve it. Use long generated passwords, set them per machine rather than reusing one, and remove access when a device is retired.
A remote desktop session shows everything on screen. Running the relay yourself means the video, the file transfers and the clipboard never pass through a company that could be compelled to log them.
Start now
Spin up an offshore VPS and install RustDesk from the catalog, or read the documentation.