Hi Tom,
Thanks for your reply, I was hoping you would chip in given your
experience here.
On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 09:18:32PM +0100, Tom Crosby wrote:
> Honestly, you're really going to struggle to run anything for more than a
> couple of people, and once you've done a decent bit of exploring and
> building it's going to become unplayable unless you've really opted for a
> reasonably huge amount of RAM - and then you're looking at quite an
> expensive VPS for the purposes of running one game. I ran a server for a
> handful of people for quite some time on a Bitfolk VPS
Can you say how much RAM your VPS has, and how many Minecraft
players you could comfortably have online before performance became
unacceptable?
> it was painful enough to convince us to fork out a little bit for
> a Multiplay server instead.
Looking at
multiplaygameservers.com they seem to suggest that you
should be able to fit the following amounts of players into these
amounts of memory dedicated to the Minecraft server:
Memory (MiB) | Max # of players
-------------+-----------------
200 | 4
600 | 17
1024 | 35
2048 | 53
Now, it does say that this is the absolute minimum memory, and that
large maps may require more. Also bear in mind that they appear to
be hosting off of SSDs which will likely be providing more IOPS than
a BitFolk VPS.
Can you say how much memory your Multiplay server has, and how many
players you're able to support?
It strikes me that 600MiB is not a huge amount of memory to dedicate
to Minecraft and that 17 players may be plenty for some people. The
IOPS may be an issue however.
> sort of VPS setup that's likely to be affordable - you're much better off
> getting something that's far less flexible but far more geared towards the
> purpose.
I've no idea how comparable a 720MiB VPS would be to a 600MiB
Multiplay server, but the VPS will set you back £137.88/year inc.
VAT, whereas the Multiplay server would be £153.00/year inc. VAT.[1]
Conversely, for £167.88/year inc VAT you can have a 960MiB VPS.
I'd be interested in finding out what the IOPS requirements are for
a Minecraft server. I suspect they are quite high otherwise Multiplay
wouldn't be using SSDs.
Multiplay's prices seem quite high given that what you appear to get
is a VPS dedicated to Minecraft, backed by SSD. Possibly I'm
missing something. If not then I'm confident that I could undercut
them with servers I have taken out of service for being too slow for
VPS hosting, but with disks replaced by an SSD or two.
The problem is that I don't know what the shelf life of Minecraft
is, and I haven't got time to be playing computer games to work out
what I could host next, nor to be replicating Multiplay's quite
slick interface. I'd do all the work and then most likely Minecraft
would become old hat and no one would want to buy servers for it.
i.e. I don't see a way for me to make a product out of this.
There's spare memory capacity at the moment. If anyone would like
to experiment with how usable a Minecraft server is on a BitFolk VPS
at various levels of RAM then I'd be willing to let you do that
for free provided you write up your findings.
Such VPSes would be purely for testing Minecraft though and once I
need to sell the resources I'd have to convert you to a paying
customer or end the arrangement.
Also at the moment I am exploring caching block devices with SSDs.
Once I have a server in that configuration colocated then it would
be worth repeating the experiments to see if/how that improves
matters.
Finally, I might be willing to provide a single BitFolk Minecraft
server free of charge for use by BitFolk customers (only), if any of
you would actually use it. I personally probably wouldn't have time
and I'm aware that several of you are running your own Minecraft
servers already, and realise you probably want to focus your
Minecraft attentions there. :)
Cheers,
Andy
[1] I gather from
http://forums.multiplay.co.uk/feedback-bug-reports-etc/78738-vat
that Multiplay are not providing customers with VAT invoices, so
those outside the EU are paying VAT when they don't need to, and
VAT registered customers may find it difficult to claim back the
VAT. Not that I imagine there are many business users of a
Minecraft server...
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting