Server Fees

[Anume]

Server fees are due on February 15th, 540 USD for the whole next year. Our current total is only 258 USD so quite a bit is still missing.

It would be nice if some of you could donate a bit so Erelei and I do not have to pay the difference completely out of our own pockets.

[egreir]

I will throw in 100...............if I get assurances that battlemages are redone in the next 60 days

[Anume]

We're at 333 USD, ty!

[Anume]

We're at 451 USD, thank you guys.

[F-3000]

How on earth the payment is that high? I know that webhotel is different thing, but I pay ~65€/y (~$75/y) for my site.

[Erelei]

Hey @F-3000, I think it goes without saying that a lot of people are perplexed.

First, you're trying to compare apples to oranges, here. Webhotel is web hosting - and you're paying more than you should be ($75 a year?! for a single website?!). You could easily get very affordable, 99.9% up-time webhosting for ~$28 a year, and have resources available to host a small to medium size traffic'd website.

That said, web hosting is shared hosting - you share an IP. You share a single (or sometimes several IPs) between 10-50 different customers (if it's done right). If it's done wrong, you're sharing an IP between hundreds of other customers, which means one thing - stability goes down into the shithole.

FL is hosted on a Centos7.6 server, Cloud virtualization built on OpenStack. This means that resources, especially disk access, is guaranteed over something like Shared Hosting or VPS hosting. In the end, it's blazingly fast with SSD drives, (150GB in this case, but FL take sup around 20GB, so we have room), 6GB of RAM, premium 12TB of bandwidth, and a Skylake Intel Core Processor with 6 cores dedicated to resources we'll be using specifically. We're not sharing a damn thing.
 

What a lot of people don't realize is that FL has, in the past, been hosted over seas at companies which boast MUD hosting for ~$20 to $30 a month. That equates to around $120 cheaper than what we normally paid in the past. However, the big seller here is DDoS protection. We have LVL 7 filtering that will prevent DDoSing (especially against our IPspace) from causing outages. Sure, things may slow down *a little bit*, but all traffic is filtered by Voxility, (which is expensive in its own) and then routed back to the server IF we're DDoS'd - does anyone remember several years ago when some script kiddie asshole DDoS'd the hell out of us and we had to whitelist people to play? That won't be necessary, ever.

That - and I have full control of the server. I don't answer to anyone. Our resources, as explained, are not shared. Consider this a Desktop that's virtualized, sitting in a Datacenter manned 24/7 by technicians day and night - hardware isn't an issue, and software definitely isn't and never will be. Downtime is essentially non-existent save for a natural disaster - but even then, our data being in the Cloud can easily be transferred to another stack a thousand miles away in minutes, and back online on the same IP space.

Long story short - let's not compare Web hosting with our server.

For what it's worth - the forum host, theforsakenlands.com, is hosted on my Personal VPS that costs nothing to me, and is provided to me from work at no extra charge - so we're not paying for webhosting at all. Perks of working in the field, I guess

[Anume]

Update: we've reached the 540 USD, thanks a lot guys.

Current total: 540.58 USD

Some small donations over the next few months would be very welcome still however to fill up our account again which will be empty after paying the server fee.

[F-3000]

 

On 2/1/2019 at 1:59 AM, Erelei said:

First, you're trying to compare apples to oranges, here.

As I said I already knew that webhotel and server are two different things. But considering those specs you slammed on the table, those two are in no way comparable in this case, because you'd host several webhotels with that stuff.   It's more like comparing a potato and a fruitbasket.
 

On 2/1/2019 at 1:59 AM, Erelei said:

you're paying more than you should be ($75 a year?! for a single website?!). You could easily get very affordable, 99.9% up-time webhosting for ~$28 a year, and have resources available to host a small to medium size traffic'd website.

I know it's rather expensive. To be honest, you made me do some digging for other hosts, and it looks like that I wont be getting a finnish host with less than 58€/y ($66/y) with abilities that I'm looking for. I'd be interested to know about a host with such a rather low price that you mentioned.
 

On 2/1/2019 at 1:59 AM, Erelei said:

blazingly fast with SSD drives, (150GB in this case, but FL take sup around 20GB, so we have room), 6GB of RAM, premium 12TB of bandwidth, and a Skylake Intel Core Processor with 6 cores dedicated to resources we'll be using specifically.

Is all that necessity? Because if it is, then damn! 😳 FL takes 20 GB?? That's HUGE. Able to break down that number further? Would be very interesting. (if it's not a big deal)
 

On 2/1/2019 at 1:59 AM, Erelei said:

However, the big seller here is DDoS protection.

Sounds good.
 

Also, thanks for all the interesting info.
 

On 2/1/2019 at 5:05 PM, Anume said:

Update: we've reached the 540 USD, thanks a lot guys.

Awesome.

[Magick]

1 hour ago, F-3000 said:

FL takes 20 GB?? That's HUGE. Able to break down that number further? Would be very interesting. (if it's not a big deal)

To save a repeat, this question was basically asked on Discord.  Here's the answer:

Erelei Last Friday at 1:22 AM
i keep backups of the code, as well as backups of pfiles and a second instance for a build
but the source code is only like 2GB
[mud@host.theforsakenlands.com ~]$ du -chsx CursedLands/ Test/
2.0G    CursedLands/
786M    Test/
2.8G    total

 

So mostly backups of various ages.

[Aidon]

I think people should ask themselves-- would they rather time be spent testing to see if the mud can run without SSDs, lots of RAM, fast cpu, etc, and not lag, crash, etc, or would they rather that same time be spent adding features, running plots, etc.

The perhaps amusing part is that given the age the mud probably used to run on hardware with specs more like a raspberry pi than a modern server, but even the absolute cheapest VPS you can buy from a reliable company with decent specs is going to run a few hundred. So the savings is minimal when weighed against the risk of the mud going down or the time spent testing.