Free hosting.

Hey, I was just wondering what's everyone's opinions on the free Amazon cloud server?
It should be able to run 10 players, right? Is it a decent option to start a server with and then have a later upgrade? Pros, Cons?

I'd really appreciate some insite.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Why don't you try it?

 

I wouldn't trust it. Clouds are stupid, you have to pay a HIGH fee for what you use, etc, etc.

Basically with that, once you go over your free quota, you have to start paying.

 

1) you need a credit card to sign up for this "free hosting"

2) as soon as you go over one of the free tiers, it's charge time

 

You should try it out, see what happens. You can't go over any limit on RAM, that's limited by the set amount the free account gets, so your only real worry is bandwidth, and I believe you get plenty of bandwidth free for the year.

 

15GB of bandwidth is not very much. When I had less users than that playing regularly, we were still pushing 50GB a month.

 

Nathan C
Most resources can be given a limit when running Java. As for bandwidth, I'm planning on using this for maybe 5 friends on a daily basis, as well as testing my plugins. You guys think this would be fine?

 

Code:

750 hours of EC2 running Linux/Unix Micro instance usage
750 hours of EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server Micro instance usage
750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing
30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) plus 2 million IOs and 1 GB snapshot storage
15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services
1 GB of Regional Data Transfer

I would think that would be good.. Watch your bandwidth use though, if you go over 5-7 players you may eat through more than 15 gigs per month.

 

Cancel.

 

I ate 50GB in a day, although admittibly that was with a small DDoS attack.

Normal usage for me is around 1GB/day with no attacks, and that's with very few players. My smallest day was under 500MB total, with very little activity. Thus, I'd say it *is* possible, but very hard, you'd need to use chunk caching and a very small player slot allocation.

 

The AWS Micro (Free Tier) is barely enough to run bukkit w/ plugins. Don't even think about using LogBlock (or similar) since it can do 250,000 I/O requests a day .. passing the free requirement for the month (1,000,000) in 4 days. This doesn't even take into account the bandwidth restrictions..

Maybe with almost no intensive plugins and limited saving you could handle 5 without going over usage ... you will be able to give 512-550mb max to java in the free tier and make sure not to use all the memory or you will be greeted with "Killed." and having to restart bukkit.

There are many online tutorials about using one for a free Vanilla server, so I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to run bukkit instead.

The bandwidth is actually great but I feel the free tier is more meant for web development.

They have many higher tiers available, but cost is higher than what you get from a VPS or a dedicated server.

I tried it still, you should to, it was a fun learning experience.

Reminder: Make sure to release your Elastic IP if its not in use ... costs $0.01 per hour if not attached to an instance.
In fact just study the terms very closely lol.

 

I plan to use this for 3 - 5 friends. Three plugins max, just vanilla really. Any other remarks of what I should look out for?

 

Watch your bandwidth use.

If you go over 15 gigs, they start charging!

 

Once again, bandwidth. 15gb is tiny. I have a max of 30 players on during the day at one time and push 200gb-300gb a month.

Oh, also 100mb of storage is pretty small. You definitely don't want to walk very far from spawn and delete your log files fairly often.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

I like the idea though I'm not sure what would be good to run on it. MC I'm not sure, but a small website sure. 5 player server yeah I'm sure. I don't think you guys would be playing everyday of every hour.