Waterdog PE Server Hosting

What is WaterdogPE and what does it do?

WaterdogPE is proxy software for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, written in Java. It was built from scratch by the developers of the original Waterdog proxy and uses Cloudburst's protocol library. Think of it as the Bedrock counterpart to BungeeCord or Velocity in the Java Edition world.

The proxy sits between players and your actual game servers. Players only ever connect to the proxy's address; it accepts them, authenticates them with Xbox Live and sends them to the first available server on its priorities list, usually a lobby. When a player later moves from the lobby to a minigame server, the connection is not dropped, because the proxy moves them to the new server behind the scenes. If a game server crashes, players can be sent to another server instead of being kicked.

This setup is ideal for communities that have outgrown a single server or want to run different game modes on separate servers. Each mode uses its own resources, lag in one mode does not spill over into the others, and players see the whole network as a single address.

What does the WaterdogPE plan cover, and where do backends run?

This plan runs only the proxy. Your lobby, minigame or survival worlds run on backends, which are hosted as separate servers and added by address to the servers list in the proxy's config.yml. You can rent one of our PocketMine-MP, Nukkit or PowerNukkitX plans for those backends, or run them on your own VDS.

WaterdogPE works with most common Bedrock server software, and PocketMine-MP and the Nukkit family are the most widely used backends. Compatibility fixes have also been made for Mojang's BDS, but not every server type is supported to the same degree, so compare your planned setup against the compatibility table in the WaterdogPE documentation.

Version support has two layers too: a Bedrock client has to be supported both by the proxy and by the backend it is routed to. When Mojang ships a new version, WaterdogPE needs an update first, followed by each backend's software. If you use PocketMine-MP as a backend, whose official updates ended in July 2026, plan for this early.

How do you set up config.yml and the backend servers?

On first launch WaterdogPE generates config.yml and lang.ini. Stop the proxy, add your backends to the servers list in config.yml, set the server players should land on first in the priorities list, and start it again. Keep online_mode enabled, because turning it off lets anyone connect under any name. prefer_fast_transfer turns transfer requests sent by backend plugins into fast transfers, and values such as motd and max_players control what players see in their server list.

On the backend side there is one critical rule: because the proxy handles authentication, backends must run in offline mode. Set xbox-auth=false in server.properties, and if you use PocketMine-MP, also set player.verify-xuid to false in pocketmine.yml. If a backend tries to authenticate a second time, players cannot connect.

This has a security consequence. Someone who connects directly to an offline-mode backend could join under another player's name. Do not share backend addresses with players, and where possible limit backends to accept connections only from the proxy. Our support team can help you work out how to apply that to your setup.

How many resources does a WaterdogPE proxy need?

A proxy does not simulate a game world; it never calculates chunks, entities or redstone. That is why it needs far less memory than a game server. Its real workload is encrypting each player's connection, compressing and decompressing packets and relaying them in both directions, which leans on the CPU more than on RAM. Current WaterdogPE releases run on Java 17 or newer and use memory through the JVM heap.

For small and medium networks with a few backends, Bronze 4GB is comfortably enough. When concurrent players start passing a hundred, Silver or Gold leaves more headroom. An honest note beyond that: Platinum and Diamond still have 4 vCores, so extra RAM does little for a proxy. For a genuinely busy network, the right step is Emerald with 6 vCores or Xtreme with 12. The upstream and downstream compression levels in config.yml shift the balance between bandwidth and CPU use, so measure the effect before moving far from the defaults.

How do players join the network and move between servers?

Players connect only to the proxy's address. On Android, iOS and Windows they open Add Server in the Servers tab and enter the WaterdogPE IP and port shown in your panel. Out of the box the proxy listens on Bedrock's familiar port 19132, but your assigned port may be different, so give players whatever the panel shows.

A connecting player first lands on the server at the top of the priorities list, usually the lobby. Moving from the lobby to a game server starts when a menu, NPC or command plugin on the backend sends a transfer request. If the target server is in the proxy's list, WaterdogPE handles it as a fast transfer, and the player never leaves the network.

Running a proxy does not change the console situation, and Xbox, PlayStation and Switch players still cannot type in a server address. DNS redirects such as BedrockConnect or apps that make a server appear as a LAN game give access to the entire network once they point at the proxy address. These tools are built by the community.