Hello Max,
Are there any plans to implement a service to facilitate direct connections between hosts instead of connections relaying through your servers unless manually setting up port forwarding and using direct IP's?
I am not sure what service you can possibly mean. A connection can be either direct or mediated through a server - be it our public server or a self-hosted server. If our public servers don't work for you well, feel free to use the
self-hosted server, this is one of the reasons why we offer it (for free).
If you mean peer-to-peer connectivity though, I am sorry but this is not the way to go for us. It might work for free and personal tools, but since we also sell to businesses they won't be happy to use a P2P application due to security concerns that such applications can bring.
I've frequently ran into performance issues through the various relays used by Remote Utilities. Way, way, too frequently. The latency is high and there is significant ping loss. I have a PC next to me that I'm connecting to that has more than 8 seconds of latency (it's varied fr om 4-18 seconds while I've been writing this). The re's the scenic login screen and then the computer boots up with Spotify open and the large pictures seem to bring it to a crawl even with 16 bits colour. I have it on HDMI output to a monitor on my right, and then connecting using Internet ID fr om my main PC next to it. At this moment, round trip ping time to your relay server in Montreal is 163ms (from west Canada. I normally get 78ms pings to Ontario, so this Montreal hub kinda sucks as you'll see below) with approx 18% packet loss.
A ping from your location to our server doesn't say anything about the quality of the server itself. Our servers can sustain far more load than now and are located in one of the largest datacenters in Canada.
I believe you also have a relay server in California, which is closer and lower latency, approximately 50ms with no ping loss so far. So I'm not sure how hosts pick the relay servers, whether its random, first to respond, round robin, or load balanced, etc. But there is very clear and poor performance using the relay server and I don't see a way for me to bounce it to a better relay server and I don't see anything happening on the server side to migrate me to the better performing server that is 1/3 latency and without packet loss.
We recommend that you use a self-hosted server or even direct connection where possible.