Recommended VPS and VPS provider.

Discussion in 'Bukkit Help' started by Kegan187, Feb 4, 2011.

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  1. Offline

    Kegan187

    Anyone have any suggestions? I am running a VPS from HazNET that has 1.5gbs of ram, 3gbs of burst ram, 60gbs of Hard Disk Space, unmetered 7mbit BandWidth, and 2 quad-core intel CPUs. By the way it just be one CPU, I don't know though so you can check it out here. Oh and I am not promoting HazNET, just putting up my specs.

    Anyway, is there a provider that is cheap, has 2gbs of ram, has windows, and a good connect? Thanks
     
  2. Offline

    minibjarke

    why would you want windows?
     
  3. Offline

    Kegan187

    I would want windows because, for some reason, not all the information I tell certain plugins to write, gets written to the logs. In case that was hard to understand, I use BigBrother. I have it so that it writes flatfile logs for everyplayer. It does not record everything I tell it to record. For example, it will not record chest changes. Nor will it record lever switches or button presses.
     
  4. Offline

    mughi

    that has little to do with windows.

    He asks because if you look through the forums. almost all the posts from people with weird errors or difficulty connecting are running Windows. Also, Windows adds a LOT of overhead to your server, which means less resources for minecraft. You CAN use it, but if the server isn't going to be doing anything besides minecraft, you would be much better served using linux. Also.. you don't have to PAY for linux.
     
  5. Offline

    Starrk

    I have a 1gb at hazenet with no lag whatsoever.

    However, I just recently bought a 2gb and it has extreme amount of lag. It also gets spammed with "Can't keep up! Did the server time change or is the server overloaded?" at 1 person online.

    Their support is really slow too. Here's my review on Hazenet.

    Pros:
    - Extremely fair price.
    - Decent Servers. (My 1GB was extremely fast.)
    - Easy access.
    - Simple web design

    Cons:
    - Support, it's extremely slow and the staff is quite rude about everything you ask.
    - They take over a day or two to respond to you.
    - Their stronger VPS's are slower. (Tested on 3 hosts with 2gb on their server.)(Not sure about 1.5.)

    Other : To be honest, HazeNet is kind of a gamble for me.
    --- merged: Feb 5, 2011 3:10 PM ---
    Also, I did some research and found out it's run by a kid age 15.

    He also tends to ignore people. Their Orlando Fl, servers tend to shut down and time-out or not even respond a lot.
     
  6. Offline

    croxis

    In my opinion: you get what you pay for. Those prices are very low compared to others when I was shopping around, and that is not always a good thing. I suspect they are doing serious overselling which can negatively impact the resources available to your server. I personally use Linode 768 which hosts a 10 person bukkit server with 22 plugins on a 600x600 map with little lag. While a little pricy their support is great (I'm fairly experienced with linux to begin with though, but they have good starting documentation). They also don't oversell.
     
  7. Offline

    Starrk

    True, however my 1GB has had no lag since the day I bought it. I also got a huge amount off it and I have to say it's 10x better than any host I paid for pricy or not. I guess I was just assuming that all servers were great.

    My server was located in UK DockLands, but the 2gb was in Orlando Fl, seems that they had a great amount of issues there. I think the 2gb is oversold but not the 1gb. I might just test the 1.5GB then. I should have thought before doing so.
     
  8. Offline

    Kegan187

    My VPS is in Orlando, Fl and, at times, it will randomly crash or just not respond to people trying to join. It will also kick people out randomly. I will try the 1gb server I guess. And if it is really run by a little kid...... That is just messed up. You should NEVER give a kid that much power.
     
  9. Offline

    croxis

    @Starrk I suspect that both are oversold, however those on the 2GB are more likely to try and use their full amount than the 1G group.

    @Kegan187 Having taught high schoolers I assure you that there are teenagers more that capable and responsible to do a lot of awesome work. On the flip side there are people in the 50s who should never be given any kind of power, and yet they get elected.
     
  10. Offline

    Kegan187

    Yea, croxis, I know there are teenagers that are more than capable of it. I am just saying that this teenager should probably not have that much power over servers. I am 14 myself and, I hope I am correct when I say this, am responsible enough.
    --- merged: Feb 5, 2011 7:33 PM ---
    Okay, I bought a new VPS with 1gb of ram and it is in Orlando, FL. How can I get it somewhere else?
     
  11. Offline

    Obsidian

    FWIW, don't get anything with "burst RAM". That's a sign of OpenVZ emulation, which is an absolute pain in the ass to work with. Something running through actual virtualization like Xen is a lot better, but a bit more costly. Worth it in the end however, as you have much more control over your server, and you know exactly how much resources you have to work with (hosts running with OpenVZ like to complain a lot if you use burst RAM moderately frequently).
     
  12. Offline

    Clinton

    Xen has much better disk performance and memory management. I've used VMWare, Xen, and OpenVZ. I plan on playing with KVM shortly.

    When running a VPS node, one of the most over-looked things is disk speed. Some people overload disk or CPU, some do both. I highly suggest you contact your new host ahead of time and see what kind of hardware you're placed on and what you should expect.

    OpenVZ isn't isolated, it uses container based virtualization meaning you share ALL resources and nothing is actually dedicated to you.
     
  13. Offline

    Starrk

    All in all, just don't order the 2GB because it will most likely be located in Orlando FL.

    Also, I'm trying to get a refund out of him and literally nothing is working. He is just ignoring me completely.
     
  14. Offline

    iSushi

    How I got a really good server was to simply:

    - Find a server in a capital with a really good connection.
    - Rent 1 GB for one month, test the server in that period of time.
    - Rent, don't buy!
    - Geez... USE A MODIFIED VERSION OF LINUX!, if you find a host that use windows. It's bad... really bad. None of the better server hosts use windows (because it's costy,slow and nobody uses it) except if they specialize themselves on windows, and then you usually get a decent but really expensive server.
    - If you want a good windows server, you need to sell your house. When your house is sold or parents killed. Then you can buy or rent it.
    - Test their speed.

    Always put the connection/speed before the performance (you need to have a minimum hardware thought), it doesn't matter if you got a giant of a server if it isn't connected to the internet. Also, all servers are different; So don't ask for good hosts on a internet forum.
    Pick one you find good, test, and choose.
     
  15. Offline

    hash

    My two cents on VPS providers: I can't really figure out why so many folks need them. Running a server, especially a minecraft server, on a home machine seems much simpler, and at the rates most VPS providers charge, it seems to me it very rapidly becomes more economical to do it from home. Hither cometh back-of-the-envelope analysis!


    Taking Linode's machine with 1024MB RAM for an example... bout 40$ a month. You know what else is 40$ right now on newegg? A 4096MB stick of brand-spanking new DDR3 RAM... and when you buy that, you have it for good. Now, I know there's more to a computer than RAM. But what else does the example (Linode's) front page say? 32GB storage. Okay, you know about how much a GB of hard disk costs these days? Assuming you buy TB driver, comes out to about 8 cents per GB. I'd talk about the processor, but Linode doesn't seem to be real forthcoming about any detailed promises on that front (I'm assuming its because they have a wildly heterogeneous physical architecture because of adding machines over time as well as the fact that measuring actual processing performance in situations of cohabitant VMs is still more of an art than a science)... but I'm going to lowball a really minimal processor as 100$. Shucks, I just quick hopped over to newegg to back myself up again and found a pretty dang nice 3.0GHz dual core from AMD for only 75$ (Moore's law scares the hell outta me sometimes!) and I'm willing to bet dedicated service from that thing probably beats what you get on most low to mid range VPS like this 40$/month thing I've been comparing to. Toss in another 150$ bucks for a cheap motherboard, a power supply, and some case fans and... well, I basically just built a whole server from scratch for what you're going to pay to Linode in a year, and I'm pretty sure what I hand you with that budget's going to perform better than what I was modelling, even before we get to the fact the server you get to hold onto forever after that year.


    Whoa wait, I just looked at the upper end of Linode, and it only goes up to 4096MB RAM? And they charge you $159.95 a month for that? Compare that to the number for the cost of that stick of ram again, then blink, and ask yourself why people use this VPS stuff again.


    Conclusion so far: when you pay for a VPS, you're probably not shelling out that cash for the hardware rental, and if you are (and you're doing it for more than a few months maximum), you're probably an idiot.



    Now, there's one massive issue here I've left completely untouched so far (and I've done this deliberately because I want to treat it completely separately from hardware): Network Connectivity.


    That's what a VPS is really offering people, I think. Being online all the time, having tons of bandwidth, and having low latency (and maybe also just plain having a static IP address).


    Those are very tangible assets.


    But with minecraft... do you -really- need them to the point you're willing to shell out that kind of money on a continuing basis? I'm not saying this is a clear Yes or No question that I can give you a God-like answer to which will be correct for everyone always... but I would definitely like to remind people to think about whether or not the economics of their actions make sense.


    How much bandwidth does minecraft really use? Have you ever watched it? Sat there with tcpdump or wireshark or something? Do you think it sends friggin' bitmap screenshots of every frame to your clients, 60 times a second? I'll be honest, I've haven't measured it over time either, but I crunched some guestimates and I'd be pretty surprised if you're reaching in the hundreds of gigs per month of bandwidth even if you have a server where upwards of thirty people are online 8 hours a day every day of the month (if you assume 4kb/sec with the rest of that, you get to just short of 100gb, and I think those are really overly high estimates for the load most folks see). Put another way, I'm pretty sure that unless you have dialup or something similarly godawful... just about any normal home internet service around these days will provide enough bandwidth for quite a few people to play minecraft over if you have a home server. My absolute minimum comcast service does fine with dozens of folks concurrently.

    Being online all the time and having a static IP, then. How precious are those? Well, again, I'm pretty sure most people have that option. If you keep my earlier logic about just building your own damn machine instead of throwing money at a VPS month after month, you have no real excuse not to just leave it running in a closet. Static IP? Meh. Comcast, I'll again state from personal experience, gives people pretty much static IPs (and in fact, any service with an always-on modem will tend to do this for technical reasons I'm not about to get into); you just get a new IP sometimes when you power down your modem for prolonged periods of time. And anyway, there are things like dyn-dns and etcetera: automated tools to let the rest of the internet know where your machine is on the network at all times, even if your IP is changing almost constantly. So, these probably aren't that hard to come by either.

    Latency? Okay, the VPS dudes probably win there. When you own datacenters, you can talk about getting more direct connections to more "core" parts of the internet -- dealing with Tier 1 or 2 ISPs instead of Tier 3, if you want to speak the parlance of network operators -- and that means you can cut a few hops out of the paths connections take. But um, have you ever looked at a traceroute to... anywhere on the internet? Shit doesn't go in a straight line. Folks with more centrally connected datacenters might cut 1 to 4 hops out of the chain of 14 to 26. I'm just throwing out educated guesses there, but at the end of the day we're talking about tens of milliseconds of difference in latency, and that doesn't really strike me as anything to write home about. (And have you ever checked out how incredibly latency-tolerant minecraft can actually be? I'm fairly impressed with it.)



    Okay, so I apologize -- that was way more back-of-the-enveloping than I intended. Quick summary again if you got bored and skimmed (or I was unclear): paying for a VPS for any term longer than a few weeks or months seems highly uneconomical in terms of raw hardware or in terms of network solutions, and particularly for something as simple as a minecraft server.


    Unless you have really bizarre constraints like your mom won't let you leave your computer on overnight :)



    Also, ditto to everyone who says something to the general effect of "jesus, why windoze?".
     
  16. Offline

    Kegan187

    Okay Hash, people want and use VPSs or Dedicated Servers so that you can support more people, so I am lead to believe. I will try and test out how much ram and other resources my server takes up, because if I left it on before, it would swallow my ram.
     
  17. Offline

    sumTard

    a 20 man server does in fact use hundreds of GB of bandwith a month, around 350 for me. And yes its metered :p
     
  18. Offline

    thegleek

  19. Offline

    Kegan187

    I don't have enough money to rent that for 1 month! Let alone more.
     
  20. Offline

    Kaikz

  21. Offline

    Kegan187

    Wow, I might switch to that! And what is the difference between the ones in New York and the ones in Phoenix? Just the location? Also, how many people can the server hold?
     
  22. Offline

    ledhead900

    Why would you even pay for a SLICE of resources on a VPS server, A VPS server company would easily have 16 cores and at least 16 something gig of ram.

    all this kid is doing is renting to you a virtulized slice of the sysem, you get what you pay for but anyone with some basic skills could go online and start sign up to a VPS company for a FULL sever not virtulized and setup such an eviorment as this kid is doing then sell of slices of the cake so to speak until he starts making profit on what he pays per month.

    Even so tho I would NEVER run on a VPS configured like this If im going to PAY for anything I want TOTAL accsess to the machine from the OS - How it is setup.

    Tho for something like that your looking at easy over $200 p/m for 2gig
    --- merged: Feb 6, 2011 9:10 AM ---
    I don't know why you don't just invest some cash into Cloud computing its almost unlimited speed as they usual have ISP like backbone connections. And its almost the same as VPS only its hosted the machines are built into eaither server racks or cases the size of a garbage bin.

    Sure It kinda goes against my saying above about paying for a slice but slice is huge so its worth it. You get like 10gig at least and none of this core 2 or i7 stuff its actuall enterprise gear like oracle and sunsystems with 16 cores per cpu.

    u pay as much as a Decent VPS that gives u full control but u get 200% more value for money. Only draw back is u want to know how to remote a server.

    Hell with just some research I could almost invest in it my self and then sell a share of it away to others to cover my own hosting costs.

    Note: I'm not an expert I have some IT knowladge but most of that post is just my observation based on what people expect from there servers based on how much they are willing to pay. Even still in the end its all about if want to pay $20 a month or $400.

    If your choosing the later you better be sure you are prepaired to manage the company and have you self setup with a Auto reply email system and extensive documentation directory your users to can look over for all the common issues and see what you cannot fix your self.

    Basicly just be as prepaired as you can as your customers will be your second or even full time job and you will tech be employed by the service u provide.

    Be it a middle man or not your still giving a decent slice to people who are after it. It's very common to be doing this anyone poseing to be owning a VPS company and offering you a slice for less then $70 a month are not the OWNER of the company of the service they provide to you.
    --- merged: Feb 6, 2011 9:19 AM ---
    I also don't bealive in recommend when it comes to VPS and hosting of any kind I bealive in research your self then ask questions later.

    People are just going to throw an opinion at you.

    My advice - get on the net start searching around U dont need include minecraft what your hosting does not matter in what your searching for. Well it does a little bit but its only overhead that you need take into account when searching.
     
  23. Offline

    Kaikz

    I use New York, and it easily handles 10 players at once. (most I've had, can't test more)
    If users ever complain about lag, it's their connection, as the server's connection is perfect.
     
  24. Offline

    ledhead900

    Distance from player base is everything try and get one closer to your area or closer to where the majority of your players come from.
     
  25. Offline

    iSushi

    If you take it like that, you could technically (if you're willing to spend enough money), set up 4 servers around the globe. And connect them into one main server. So then the speed and connection wouldn't be any problem, as well as you have 4 servers on it, so you could support shi-loads of players before any lag would occur. But it would be hilariously expensive. But sure, if you rent out parts of those servers, you'll actually get profit from running them. :)
     
  26. Offline

    ledhead900

    Well of course did you read my other post lol. Tho as you said doing something like this is not worth it unless you have customers willing to buy shares from you and in return pay your bill.

    I'm also pretty sure if you did something on this scale you would be required to provide extensive support and be ready to be taxed.
     
  27. Offline

    Clinton

    That's not really possible.. You would still have to route the traffic to wherever the server was hosted on. If you did some sort of "cloud" method, you'd still have to have the servers talking to each other and there's still physical distance. If you had a better route you might get a little lower ping time. (This has been theorized before and was going to be a "gaming" network, but if I remember correctly they didn't make enough revenue and shutdown shortly after starting up)


    I think some of the posts in this thread my be getting the wrong interpretation on Virtual Private Servers. Running a good node/setup is not cheap, nor is it easy. I emphasize "good". I will say that some "good" VPS' will outperform lower end dedicated servers. IO speed especially and sometimes CPU power. I would love to throw out some numbers if anyone would like to compare some numbers and benchmarks.


    When paying for a VPS. You ARE paying for the hardware costs (Hopefully server grade hardware that's not cheap). However! You're also paying for power, space, and bandwidth. Those are the operating costs. Even though you could build you own server at home for a few hundred to a few thousand. You're still going to lack a datacenter connection. 100mbit/1gbit/10gbit is not cheap either. Residential connections just do not compare.

    When you rent a VPS or dedicated server you also save money if hardware fails. If it's your own hardware you pay the costs not to mention, how long until the hardware is showing age? 1 year, 2 years, 3 years? No matter how you spin it, there's going to be a downside to either side of the story.
     
  28. Offline

    mindless728

    yes and at the same time, how much of the bandwidth does your VPS get, it is not going to be the full amount or anything near that probably, though yeah a residential connection isn't that good for a server i have 10d/1u though i am thinking of getting a dedicated business line that is 5d/5u ($15 more expensive, not much)
     
  29. Offline

    Clinton

    It depends on how many people are on the server. Once again, if you run a server that's not very popular and is only for a few friends a residential connection is fine. If the connection drops or something there won't be havoc.

    And yes, we utilize 100mbit quite often.
     
  30. Offline

    Kegan187

    Okay I bought a VPS from AlienLayer. How long does it usually take for them to set it up? Oh and I got one in Phenoix. And I totally spelled it wrong.
     
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