Dedicated server host?

[nybot]

What's a decent/cheap host that allows Windows Server 2012 and gameservers to be installed? I was looking into Kimsufi but feel like the ping might be too long.

[chrsschb]

It's expensive to buy a dedicated host that allows root access and has good bandwidth.

Look into hosting your own dedicated box or run a virtual machine. What most of us do.

[provocating]

If you get serious about it, try Akkadius here. He provides top notch hosting at a good price.

[vsab]

I'm sure there's a couple who have offered to host on their mega servers, but I forget who. Might be worth searching the server discussions.

Anything with Windows is likely not to be cheap, must cheap hosts will run linux VM's.

[provocating]

Linux FTW!! Learn it, love it.

[Rikon]

I'm running a Linux EQ server using CloudatCost.com. My flavor is Debian, and I've had more success running it than a Windows based system ;)

[provocating]

I have been running my servers on Debian since the very first one. I have had zero issues, no regrets.

I am a command line junkie though, command line is sexy.

[Rikon]

I have been running my servers on Debian since the very first one. I have had zero issues, no regrets.

I am a command line junkie though, command line is sexy.

It's just a cleaner experience for me. I can't recommend it enough.

[mgellan]

I'm using an instance on Amazon ECS, works great, $18/mo for a Debian server on a micro instance for my Dev server. I'm sure it'll go to $40/mo for a live server but that's pretty damned good for a server colocation where you have 100% control of the box...

Regards,
Mg

EDIT: Oh yeah, eqemu under Linux can be a challenge to set up but man it's solid!

[provocating]

What are the stats on that VM, cores, memory, etc?

[mgellan]

t2.micro is 1cpu/1gb RAM although cpu performance is burstable so you collect idle credits when the cpu is idle and you can use them when the cpu needs more than baseline, which is perfect for a dev server thats idle a lot. Performance on my Dev server is excellent, on a Linux box with no gui and not a lot running other than eqemu / mysql I rarely see usage over .25 even with 4-5 users on. Internet bandwidth is obviously amazing.

Obviously when I go to a more widespread beta I'll have to change the instance to a t2.medium which increases the cost. But you can make that change quickly via the AWS console (needs an outage) so you can afford to be optimistic. Moving the database server to another box is as easy as cloning the instance and turning off the eqemu server on the db box and the db on the eqemu box and reconfiguring.

As your server grows you can jack the instance resources up to match, and hopefully as the cost increases player donations increase as well. You can lock in a certain level of performance and get a large discount by prepaying fully or partially as well once utilization stabilizes.

To me it would take a long ass time to rack enough enough usage charges to equal a couple of decent servers sized to max possible capacity requirements, not to mention I don't have to pay my ISP for enhanced upload bandwidth (which would be $40/mo probably) or host a physical box somewhere. Last time I hosted a decent sized physical web server and database server at a data centre it was $400/mo each for rent on the boxes and the services, although that was for a short duration project (100hoursofastronomy.org) so no discounts.

More info at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

You can get a t2.micro (Linux) instance for 1 year for free as well if you're a new customer.

Regards,
Mg

[Mitchell92]

I have a VPS from 1and1 and I've run game things on it before.

Just saying...

At the same time, if I had a better modem / gateway device, I'd run one from my home considering I have a Quad Core machine with 8GB of RAM sitting in my closet. I have Comcast, and I have one of their SMC devices, and no matter what I do, port forwarding or putting a computer in the DMZ is a major failure. I can access it but the outside world cannot. I've had them look at it... if I wanted to run a server I would have to get my own modem / router, instead of renting this shitty one.