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I heard the C/C# MC servers were pretty awesome but were very far behind the official builds. Makes sense though
Francisco
They use around 10% of the recourses the java version does.
I worked for a MC host for a while (I won't say which), which at the time (and I believe still) had a mix of leased and colo'd boxes. The average fit was around 20 clients to a dedi (with 16GB ram I think it was). Around 70 could fit on the colo boxes, with... 32GB ram maybe? Don't remember.
Anyway most clients went for 600-800MB ram, for $7-10/month or so. This was back at the end of last year, and the prices have gone down since then even, but it's quite profitable, the only problem is dealing with the 10 year olds
Edit: also worth noting, the billing/server/admin panel were all full-custom created by the owner.
Edit again: plugins were customer responsibility, and there were many issues over that. A lot of times the customer just would not understand "we do not and can not offer plugin support. There are far too many plugins for us to be familiar with any but the very most common" and would often get butthurt and go crying everywhere. We offered a select list of mods (vanilla, bukkit, canary, ...) that they could choose from as a "base". Not to mention the clients on 600MB ram who set up 25+ plugins, usually the heaviest plugins, and then complained that "OMG ITS SO SLOW YOUR SERVERS ARE CRAPPY"
@Francisco thos are lite xD, even now example partycraft :P
also if now back to plugins, old guys 20 up, dont like plugins they like vanilla servers, you know simple servers with 2 or 3 plugins for simple things.
problem are kids that want lots of plugins that they even understand how to install or work with hahah.
FTFY
@DimeCadmium ya ok that can work, but how can you deal or offer a service if a company probably managed by teens (sorry if here we have teens) offer services taht cost example:
????
Hehe... fortunately not. We did have a few clients who actually signed up as a present to their kids though, especially around Christmas...
Since it's a hosted application, its not uncommon for boxes to have large swap partitions on RAID0's or even SSD's and then the owners blame bad performance on plugins. Don't get me wrong, most of the plugins are garbage and shouldn't be used, but it's common.
Francisco
I'm a teen, thanks very much. I was 18 at the time (I'm now 19). The owner was only a couple years older than me.
What about it? One thing is you're not gonna fit 20 players in 1GB. Other than that, so what? The place I worked currently charges $10 first month and $11 recurring for 1GB, and if you went with cheaper servers/providers (less reliability, bla bla whatever, but still cheaper) you could easily charge the amount you quoted.
Or single HDD's.
I can tell you, its low profit margin. On a full server we only make around $75. And that includes SSD in RAID 1. And you can't really oversell MC as it runs somewhat like XEN. If you start a MC server with 1GB of RAM, it will allocated all 1GB of RAM right away.
There are a few tricks you can use to get it to use 50% less RAM.
What I ment is, a way of making it so you can fit 2x as many players/plugins in a 512MB etc server, then you could normally.
Java (by default), starts with some really bad settings for performance, so you change them to suit your needs, and you get a huge boost.
We're a reasonable sized Minecraft host (just under 3500 active servers) and do quite well out of Minecraft hosting without overselling or compromising on hardware. All hardware is server grade. A lot of our Minecraft nodes are leased but we have just filled our own rack. Support is always going to be a challenge with the huge number of potential configs and associated problems. (plugins, map corruption etc)
Examples of resource heavy plugins? just curious
The most resource intensive can change between Bukkit and plugin versions. Citizens, McMMO and the ore obfuscation plugins can be quite heavy.
Does that happen often? Do you offer backups for maps?
Theres actually a few programs that will attempt to fix a corrupted map, although its usually just easier to revert to a daily backup.
mostly during power failures (or when rebooting a KVM VPS from solus without acpid running)
This happened to me the other day. A customers map went corrupt and they blamed it on us and they said we were trying to take down their minecraft community. They threatened to take us to court over it. But all that we did was just give them a backup from midnight and they were all happy. Minecraft server renters amuse me sometimes.
Most of the time, it's kiddies using VolumeDrive, Kimsufi, etc.
The more professional providers have deals with nicer providers (I know someone who's selling 1GB servers with SSD storage off of Limestone Network's servers for $14/mo, which is pretty impressive).
The issue with Minecraft is that it's intensive on just about every resource, although network usage isn't too horrible (until some script kiddies DDoS you). CPU is always being hammered, RAM usage is incredible, and you can easily run into issues with disk IO. I've always stayed away from GSPs, I run my server on a rented dedi as it ends up cheaper and more stable than if I rented a server from a GSP.
I have a very large experience with it, and I know that all big MC hosts are using up to 600GB in SSD memory to run them.
It generally only happens on a power failure or a forced server restart. Thankfully those are few and far between. In the control panel we use there is a backup function for users to backup their maps
I've heard of hosts using 50k IOPS SSDs as swap to oversell on RAM for their Minecraft servers. We were even offered some servers by a well known GSP/Server provider on that basis. We do however steer clear of any cheap tricks.