Virtual Hosting - Would you try?

Hi guys,

Me and a bunch of people were thinking of opening a service to the public that enabled virtual hosting. We noticed that there are a lot of servers out there with weird ports. Lets say, for example, someone had the server IP 123.456.789 with the port 1337. Obviously, this is a very distasteful IP.

We wanted to know if it would be profitable to host a service that would translate domains, like myserver.servers.com to the IP and port. If, at all we decided to try this, would it, or could it, be made profitable?

Thanks,
dreadiscool

 

Considering it costs like 50 cents with most hosts to get a dedicated IP I can't really see the point.

 

On PMC I always see people getting weird ports for their server IPs. Those are the kinds of people we're hoping to market to. D:

 

You have a PM!

 

Ahh, but the reason they have those ports are because they are to cheap to pay for a dedicated IP (which is normally only 50 cents or so). Which means the financial feasibility of your project is put into question.

 

DNS translates names to IP addresses. No one will pay for such a service, there are many free ones available. DNS cannot translate a name to an IP and port. I really do not see how your service would work without a modified client to go along with it.

I would be interested to know how you'd make your service work.

 

Well, the thing with Minecraft's protocol is that upon joining, the client sends (in the login packet) the IP that it THINKS its connecting to. So, if I entered server.servers.com, obviously it would get resolved to the IP, but server.servers.com is sent as a data value in the 0x01 packet (or 0x02, have to check), and from there, the server can discern which IP to connect to. This way, even if the user has an ugly port, we can be the middleman in between 'server.servers.com' and '123.456.789:1337'.

Essentially, we're like a proxy - we send data to the server, and we send data to the client.

 

Your idea requires you connect to a server running a plugin that directs them properly. What port would you connect them to in order to achieve that?

 

No, for example, the subdomains server1.server.com server2.server.com and server3.server.com all point to OUR (the proxy) IP. Then, the client attempts a connect to, for example, server2.server.com. We detect this, and then we establish a connection to 123.456.789:1337, and begin forwarding data from the client to the server, and the server to client. The client thinks they've connected to server2.server.com, and the server thinks it got a client from our IP.

Obviously, this will make it appear that all accounts are coming from the same IP, but I'd make the proxy server send an extra data value to the 123.456.789:1337 server indicating the real IP of the user, and I'll write a plugin to read that data. Obviously, that part still has to be thought out more of, but that's a rough idea for now. The server (123.456.789:1337) would have to trust the proxy enough to accept the given IPs as valid.

 

I've written something that does this, and you're going to eat through a metric shitton of data with anything near 500 connections (which is at best 10 medium size servers paying you $1/month).
For anything bigger, you're going to need a whopping great connection, possibly a "true" 1gbps line or something...

 

codename_B
Well, we're going to be charging based on the rate of data transfer.

 

Then good luck getting any customers, seriously.