Hosting Providers

[jenco420]

Any dedicated server hosting that you guys would reccommend? my server is getting pretty populated and my connection can't handle it O.o so any points in the right direction would be awsome.

Also anything complicated that i would run into setting up the server?

[trevius]

I don't know much about getting hosting, but I would imagine it is expensive. Which server do you run and how many players have you seen on your server at most? Being able to handle a large number of players doesn't always require dedicated hosting. I have seen as much as 85 on mine and that is just running on a PC that I had laying around that is a few years old lol. I imagine if I can get some of the zones running on my main PC, I can probably break 100+ players.

I mention this because I run my server from home and it works just fine. So, maybe you don't actually need dedicated hosting. It is much cheaper and probably somewhat easier to manage from a home PC. The most important things in running a server are Upload Speeds and RAM. On my server right now, I have 1.7GBs of RAM and 1MB upload speed. If you can get upload speeds that fast or faster in your area, you should be able to handle numbers to be in the top 5 or so servers as far as population goes.

Of course, if you were already aware of all of this, I apologize for derailing your thread slightly. I am interested to hear of decent hosting and prices on it.

If you have any questions on getting your home PC tweaked to handle a certain amount, let me know.

[jenco420]

that's the thing i start lagging out around 30 players =( and more thry to log on but can't. i've seen some hosting provider's for as low as 8 bucks a month. but like my mom says you get what you pay for ~.~. i was just wondering what other people used.

[Asphixiate]

Trevius, what does it cost to upgrade to that kind of upload speed? Using just a standard cox connection hosting from my computer, players on my server are constantly crashing when they zone, and I suspect it is because of my upload speeds.

[trevius]

My internet connection is something like 50$ a month. I was getting 5MB down and 512k up and I found out it was only 5$ more a month to upgrade to 10MB down 1MB up! So, of course I couldn't pass that up!

I use Charter. But there are many alternatives in my area now for really nice speeds. There is Charter Cable, Multiple DSL companies, and even AT&T offering fiber, and all of them offer speeds about the same as my internet now. I would imagine there should be more choices in your areas as well unless you are in a remote location. Don't forget that you are looking for high UPLOAD speeds. Your download rate doesn't matter. Your server will use maybe 1/5 the download that it uses compared to how much upload it uses.

One thing to help tweak the server is to make sure you are loading many dynamic zones (I run 50 now). And make sure to set a wide range of ports on your router to have at least double as many ports as you have dynamic zones. So if you have 50 dynamic zones, you might set port ranges in the router to 7000 - 7100, but you could even set it to 7000 - 7500. You can also try my zone resetter quest which will clear player ghosts out of your zones, and that makes your server stable for a longer amount of time. You can find it in the Custom Quests section of the forums here.

There are many other things that can cause you to waste the bandwidth you do have. One of the problems to look out for is large zones with a ton of spawns. Especially if you are using a zone as your "server base" like Nexus or PoK, try to make sure they only have the characters that your server needs. Well, that is if you are making a custom server. This is because popular zones mean alot of players and the server sends out updates to all players in each zone normally 1 time per minute on seperate times for each zone. So, if you have 500 mobs in a zone and there are 20 players in it, it has to send location and other information out 500X20. This will cause spikes in CPU usage that you can see on your server if you open windows task manager pretty clearly.

I recommend trying to use smaller zones for customizing and very small zones for your server base like Nexus or Guildhall or something. That way, you can have 20 or 30 NPCs in the zone and not have it seem empty. And if you have any extra mobs in a zone you are customizing, removing them does help. I know when I redid PoValor, it somehow had all of the NPCs from PoTranquility floating out in the middle of nowhere. So, I just removed them all.

For server hardware, RAM is the most important thing. The more RAM you have, the more stable your zones will be. The only other thing to worry about is CPU. But, I have heard that a nice NIC and Router don't hurt either.

That's all I can think of for now.

[trevius]

Originally Posted by jenco420

that's the thing i start lagging out around 30 players =( and more thry to log on but can't. i've seen some hosting provider's for as low as 8 bucks a month. but like my mom says you get what you pay for ~.~. i was just wondering what other people used.

Hosting for 8$ a month is probably just web hosting, which is for making websites. If you want hosting to run an Emu server, you would need a different kind of hosting which is quite a bit more expensive. I am pretty sure about that.

[jenco420]

http://www.hagenhosting.com/plans/professional.html

Is what i was looking at 20 bucks a month + a setup fee does'nt seem to bad... i dunno tho ~.~

i dunno what the upload/download speeds are so that's what is holding me back atm.

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Web hosting, you need a dedicated server.

[Luminarius]

If Verizon operates in your area you should definitely look into getting FiOS (their new fiber optic network). It's pretty blazing fast and the price is not all that different from DSL. We have 15mb down / 2mb up which should be more than enough for a popular emu server in my opinion. Ours is around 50 bucks a month. Home PC with FiOS would be ideal.

[jenco420]

thanks for the help matt and lum =). new at all this ~.~

[trevius]

Originally Posted by Luminarius

If Verizon operates in your area you should definitely look into getting FiOS (their new fiber optic network). It's pretty blazing fast and the price is not all that different from DSL. We have 15mb down / 2mb up which should be more than enough for a popular emu server in my opinion. Ours is around 50 bucks a month. Home PC with FiOS would be ideal.

2MB up should be enough to get 150 to maybe even 200 players. For that many, you will want a pretty beefy server and probably want a secondary zone server to share the load. But if you are staying below 100ish players, you should be able to handle it just on a fairly nice PC. I would recommend at least 2GBs of RAM.

[fault]

dedicated boxes and VPS are extremely inexpensive. I use 1and1 for all my needs, I have hosting, a vps and a dedicated from them.

Their vps(Virtue private servers) all come with amd dual core opteron 1.75ghz, ram varies from 128MB dedicated with 256 bursts to 512MB dedicated 1024MB bursts, space and monthly transfer are extremely good for the price and 1and1 all hosting/servers are on a true 100MBiT pipe. which you don tpay extra for, you dont pay extra for 64bit support or plesk either. You also recieve a free domain for the vps. Currently they have a special (ending in 7 days) if you sign up for a vps 3 you pay 1$ setup and 3 months free.


The dedicated servers are great, from 99 to 399 a month from single core to quad core, no less then 1gig(99$one) and up to 8gigs(399$one) of ram.


link

total experience with this host: since 2005 with Bussiness hosting, Developer hosting, VPS3, and a root server 1.

great thing about 1and1 they have lax terms you can do anything you wish on your box as long as it isnt something like terrorism.


and Im sorry with my knowledge of running servers, you cannot run a lag free server with a 2MBiT uplink you need atleast a 10MBiT, but it is preferred you have a 100MBiT

[trevius]

I don't know how much experience you have with running an EQEmu server, but you can certainly run a lag free server with 2MBits. The size of the upload only limits the number of players you can have on your server before connection issues start.

My server runs lag free even with 85 players on and that is only with 1MBit upload. My previous internet upload was listed as 512k, but I got more like 750k and I could handle about 60 characters before there started being connection issues. So, I would imagine that 2Mbits would handle 150 just fine and maybe more. At that point, server hardware is more important to keep stability. Ideally, a separate zone server should probably be used for every 75 players you have, depending on the power of the servers.

I never see any lag on my server since I started using my zone resetters to clear out player ghosts every few hours from popular zones. And I hear that Linux doesn't even have the ghosting problem at all. The only things I notice when my player numbers get really high are that zone crashes happen more often and sometimes player have trouble getting logged into the server.

Maybe if you are talking about EQLive server player numbers, then yes, of course you would want 100Mbits. But I see no reason why any EQEmu servers would even need 10Mbits currently. None are even close to the numbers to require that. Of course, overkill never hurts lol. I definitely wouldn't complain if I had 10MBits upload to match my 10Mbits download.

1.5 up is enough for 150+ people easy.

Its the processor + Ram thats needed at that point.

[TheLieka]

Originally Posted by Luminarius

If Verizon operates in your area you should definitely look into getting FiOS (their new fiber optic network). It's pretty blazing fast and the price is not all that different from DSL. We have 15mb down / 2mb up which should be more than enough for a popular emu server in my opinion. Ours is around 50 bucks a month. Home PC with FiOS would be ideal.

That's what our server is running now - I can verify that it's amazing. The wacky part is - it's cheaper than el cheapo consumer cable. Verizon is really trying to gobble up as much market share as they can - and from what I've seen and heard, they're doing a pretty damn good job.

I have a T1 into my house currently, and that's what we started hosting with, but when we hit around 120ish people, we started getting random disconnects, and wacky bugs, etc. I thought I was having an issue with my firewall (Cisco ASA 5505), then looked at the bandwidth usage, and sure enough - we were capping it out. I thought it was impossible so I kept testing it for about a month, trying to see if there was anything else that could be doing it, but unfortunately I was able to verify that it was all from the zone servers. :(

Shortly after that, I had some major shit go down at work, and didn't know if I'd be able to keep on the project, so one of our staff took over the hosting - and the fucker got FIOS.

One unintended side-effect of FIOS though: It makes you realize how tiny your epeenir was before you got it (or in my case, how tiny my epeenir is compared to Gronkus's). :(


Dax