Minecraft, awesome one man game project

[James]

It's back up, for now. I still am considering my options.

I'm thinking it might be time to bring my server home regardless.

I'll let everyone know, but at least for a few days, it's up and running. Next step is to continue communications with the company (GNAX) that my previous provider was renting the space from.

[linoleum]

I've been following that WHT thread, it's gotten pretty nasty. At least you can finally get your stuff.

[lomar]

Take a look at the servers where I work. Inmotionhosting.com Good prices. 24/7 support. We are growing like crazy. We are not going anywhere. I would let you host it on my server but my VPS does not have enough ram.

[linoleum]

I'll let everyone know, but at least for a few days, it's up and running.

Hours.

Hopefully it is because you are getting it fixed up better and not because they are randomly shutting it down again.

[James]

Hours.

Hopefully it is because you are getting it fixed up better and not because they are randomly shutting it down again.

Nope.

Currently the status is: I can either be forced to pay $300 to host the server with GNAX the company that was reselling space to Openreaction.com, or I can not have access to my system. I do not have the option to pick up my equipment, due to the horrible legal quagmire that is happening. Basically, my equipment is still legally in control of Openreaction.com, which means that without a release signed from them, I can't even go pick it up.

Everything is intact on the server, I just can't get to it.

[linoleum]

I played around with EC2 last night. It's incredibly easy to get a minecraft server up and running on it, but I'm not sure I could afford to keep a decent server up full time (or I've got the pricing wrong). What I did was a "small" spot instance for an hour, for a total of 3 cents so far because I'm still under the free tier bandwidth and storage caps. The "micro" instance "locks up" with really, really bad lag due to (based on minecraftforum posts) cpu throttling. But even 3 cents an hour x 24 hrs x 30 days is $21.60/mo, bandwidth and storage aside.

Makes me realize what a leech I/we have been on James.

[Timman_24]

Can we simply make an old computer a server? I have some old computer parts sitting around.

[kpxgq]

Can we simply make an old computer a server? I have some old computer parts sitting around.

i dont think the issue is hardware... its who wants to have an extra system running 24/7 sucking 100+ watts for the benefit of maybe 10 other people

also, most home users are not going to have enough upload bandwidth to support a game server

[Timman_24]

i dont think the issue is hardware... its who wants to have an extra system running 24/7 sucking 100+ watts for the benefit of maybe 10 other people

also, most home users are not going to have enough upload bandwidth to support a game server

How much bandwidth do you think James uses?

[James]

It would actually be cheaper to run it from home for me (power would be less than $60 a month), but at the same time, I don't know that my bandwidth would handle it. Right now I'm taking the time to reconsider what I want to do with the server. If nothing else, once I get ahold of it, I will create a backup/zip etc. of the Minecraft instance for anyone who wants it.

[James]

How much bandwidth do you think James uses?

I can post some graphs, etc. when I get the server back up.

But honestly, it wasn't Minecraft itself that used much bandwidth. (Highest spike seen during use of 5-6 players was 200Kbps sustained transfer.)

No, it was actually that Google API map thing. Once I added that, I had constant spikes of up to 1Mbps (my 95% threshold). Without the map, minecraft doesn't consume much bandwidth. It does consume great amounts of ram and a decent amount of CPU though. My dual-core Opteron 1.8GHz (Old, I know) was constantly pegged at around 80% usage of both cores, and the queue depth was never below a 2.5 in Ubuntu.

[Timman_24]

I can post some graphs, etc. when I get the server back up.

But honestly, it wasn't Minecraft itself that used much bandwidth. (Highest spike seen during use of 5-6 players was 200Kbps sustained transfer.)

No, it was actually that Google API map thing. Once I added that, I had constant spikes of up to 1Mbps (my 95% threshold). Without the map, minecraft doesn't consume much bandwidth. It does consume great amounts of ram and a decent amount of CPU though. My dual-core Opteron 2.0GHz (Old, I know) was constantly pegged at around 80% usage of both cores, and the queue depth was never below a 2.5 in Ubuntu.

How much ram are we talking?

[James]

Keep in mind I was running 2 instances. 4GB of RAM on the box, 4GB of RAM consumed, plus swap between those two processes, map generation, and the OS/mail server/web server (which only served my personal email/web services.)

Darksavior was not a stout box.
1.8GHz Dual-core 1st gen Opteron.
4GB RAM
2x 250GB hdd in RAID1
onboard gigabit ethernet
nForce chipset (yeah, back then )

*Edit: For what it's worth, I'm in the process of moving to U-Verse. The highest end offering is (in theory) 24Mbps down/ 3Mbps up. Should be more than enough for a server. Plus U-Verse doesn't mind hosting web/mail servers on a "personal" connection, and they offer static IP's for like $5 a month. So once I get DS back home, if there isn't any colocation services comparable to what I had before, I will simply host it from home.

[BoogyMan]

Christ guys, I'll host a server but I only have 2 gigs ram.

[ImaNihilist]

How much RAM do you need? 1.7GB or 7.5GB?

This is what EC2's got.