there is wolfs now in the game

What server do most people here play on?

Get a VPS from say ventraip or similar and host it there... split the cost makes it cheap.

Willing to put in for server costs.

So long as I get money, power and/or women from it.

Slov and I have paid for a months worth of the Elite VPS from virpus(in the US)
With the 2.5GB of ram and 3TB of data per month we should be able to handle at least 25-30 people on the server at once.

The only issue at the moment is that i cant get the server up and running yet. It will run fine for the first few mins and then it will just simply crash without any explaination as to what happened. It is running Linux (Ubuntu) which i have set up a minecraft server on before (currently running a test minecraft server on mc.orbitoid.net). I think it has something to do with the version of Java that was installed. Anyway thats my issue to sort out.
Once the server is up and running I will post back in here with an address for you all to connect to and we can start testing it to see if it will be suitable.

Oh and as a side note we will be running bukkit on this server with a mod called Big Brother. This will enable us to undo any changes any griefers make to the server. We will also be using a whitelist to ensure that we know who will be connecting to the server. Obviously we wont be able to do any of this until the server is up and running properly.

I was thinking of trying to keep the server as close to the unmodded game as possible. What are your thoughts? Would you prefer mods or just the un-modified Minecraft experience?

Un modded, un big brothered. Just protect all the cool shit that gets made and hide your treasurez.

Survival is the best kind of Minecraft experience, raiding and looting other peoples houses to steal their riches and shit

Gah it turns out that Virpus doesnt allow any Java to be run on their VPSs. I think you can do it but you have to pay an extra $5 a month or something. I cant believe how long i spent trying to fix that before i realised what the issue was.
Anyway any other suggestions for hosts? preferably in Australia, 2.5GB of RAM would be ideal and hopefully around the $30 per month mark.

im willing to chip in for the costs if you wanna go balls out?

For that cheap you won't get anything that well specced.

Jumba will give you 1gb for $30/mth
Outside of that, AU hosting is expensive currently.

Lets at least test what we have already paid for:

Server name: mc.orbitoid.net
Mods currently running: none
Player limit: 30

Join and test it out. try to make it lag as much as possible. report back here with your experiences.
Please remember this is purley to test for lag. As it stands we only have 1GB of RAM on this server and i just want to see how well it performs (at least until i either get a refund or some extra ram).
I was getting a ping time of around 250ms (ish) so I'm not sure how well it will do.

Thats some laggy ass shit, There is no way I'd accept that for a server, no matter what you're paying for it.

I'm serious when I say I'm willing to put in some cash for something better, let me know man.

Its not too bad once you get outside the spawn protection area. But yeah we would want something a bit closer (and hopefully faster).

I have a paypal account set up with a donate button on my site www.orbitoid.net
I will pay for the server and people can donate what they are willing to. I just dont want to get myself into any trouble... or debt.

Does this sound like a good idea? is there another way we can do the whole donation thing? Paying for this server is going to have to be a group effort (for now) and I'm still not 100% sure how much it is going to cost.

It's hard to rely on donations, it could work though. If we can get a fun server going, with a large fan base you could even make money off it. who knows.

I dont think making money should be the goal of the server. Any money that we get for donations will be put straight back into the server. Hiring a VPS that is going to be suitable looks like it will cost a fair bit so i doubt we will have any excess.
If we end up getting a fair bit then we should use the extra to help pay for the domain (when/if we get a Respawn sub domain).


Can anyone else test the server for lag? Just remember that you cannot just build/destroy blocks within the first 8 (or 16?) blocks in any direction from your spawn point.

I walked a fair way and the lag still sucked ass. New server is needed

Ok well if a new server is needed then I will need some help finding one.

If we assume 15 people will be on the server at all times the requirements are as such:
1.5GB of RAM (1*)
10mbps (up and down) connection for the net (2*)
~150GB per month data usage. (3*)
50GB of HDD space (4*)
ping times <200ms (5*)
Cost = How ever much we can get donated.

(1*) ~100MB of RAM per user on at any one time. so 15 people would be 1.5GB of ram. Plus the OS (if using linux we would need about 100MB or so.) I think we could get away with 1.5GB of RAM fine.

(2*)Bandwidth seems to vary depending on how much exploring people do. When i was playing on the server before it was using anywhere between 15kBps and 250kBps download - can anyone else confirm how much it uses for them when playing on a multiplayer server?

(3*) 15 people @ 100KBps for 5 hours a day at 5 days a week = 98GB per month
A server that I hosted a while ago with around 6-7 people on it regulary had a map size of around 75MB after a month or so.
The backups would be around 200(ish)MB. If we do a backup every day thats 6GB a month.
So to allow for people who will explore heaps and make lots of changes we would need around 150GB of data per month.

(4*) The MC server is pretty damn small and the only other things we need the space for are the plugins, map(/s?) and OS.

(5*)200ms is what we got with Virpus and that was too much.



I have no idea how much we will need to pay for a server with these specs yet. The main thing that makes it expensive is the RAM. We cant really get away with less than 1.5GB of RAM from what i have read online and what i have seen myself. even 1.5GB of RAM is still a bit low for 15 people.

If anyone else can have a look for a server with these specs that would help. Post back here with what you find.

Lag or no lag we have the virpus server until 27/05/11. After heaps of trouble I finally have the Minecraft server up with 2.5GB of RAM and all the resources it should have had from the beginning.
the address is mc.orbitoid.net so connect and play if you can deal with the lag. Unless i can think of something better to do with this VPS until 27/05/11 it will just be running this unmodded minecraft server.

I will keep looking for a new (closer) server.
I'm thinking of maybe just trying the Jumba 1GB plan that Jeffy suggested previously. It would only allow us to have around 10 people on it at any one time but that should be enough for now. If we need more later then we can work it out then.

Now i just need to get another $30 to try it out.

Definatly Host a minecraft server. its becoming pretty viral and its a chill game at liek 3am lol. oh and btw i was the one who built tht UBERLY visible obsidium town on the projector lol. theres also a new game out called terraria i think its like minecraft but more like the gameboy version. worth a look into aswell. il donate $20 to the minecraft server also lol

terraria looks like an awesome game. I will have to investigate further. there is also Ace of spades
Which looks like Minecraft with guns. So i'll be looking into that as well

If you want to donate $20 that would be awesome. The best way to donate is paypal on my site. That will let me use the money donated to pay for a server straight away.
Please let me know if/when you have donated, either through here or pm me.