Foundry Hosting on AWS Free Tier

 This short guide shows how to host a Foundry instance on AWS for free (for 1 year).

Get Foundry

This bit is not free, you need to own foundry to run your games in it. Head on over to https://foundryvtt.com/ there are numerous YouTube videos explaining why it's so great. I made the jump from Roll20 to Foundry VTT and have not looked back!

Sign up for AWS

You can get a free tier account, you will need to supply some credit card details to get setup. Head over to https://aws.amazon.com/free

Setup Foundry on an AWS Free Tier EC2 Instance

Login to your new AWS account and head over to the EC2 page
  • Launch a windows server instance - pick the free tier!
  • Create a key pair so you can login
  • Once its up and running Connect to the instance with RDP 
    • You will need the key pair to get the admin password
  • Download and install Foundry
  • Download and use nssm https://nssm.cc/ to turn Foundry into a service
    • This page explains how to use nssm https://nssm.cc/usage
    • The 'local files' are now located at: C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\FoundryVTT


  • Browse to localhost:30000 from the server and set your 
    • Foundry admin password! Make it a strong one
    • [Optional] change the default port 
Here I have done the basic setup and started to add Game Systems
  • Open the Foundry port in the windows firewall
  • Open the Foundry port in the EC2 Security group, inbound rules


    • Rule 1 allows the traffic to the Foundry services that is on port 30000 by default
      • This you need to allow for any IP that will join - 0.0.0.0/0 means its fully open
    • Rule 2 if you want to share a folder to your local machine to copy content - I suggest you just allow for the IP range of your machine, which you can pick from the dropdown
    • Rule 3 is for RDP access - this rule is added automatically - if you are normal home internet, you will need to check the IP as your home IP will change from time to time
  • Assign an Elastic IP Address (a static IP) to your instance in AWS - this means the external link for your instance will stay the same always 
    • If you are really keen set up an A record on a domain you own to point to the now static IP of your AWS instance

  • Check if you can load Foundry from your local PC & let the games commence!