Look for the magazine Linux Format, EL should be there in the January issue.
_winterdyne_, is the 400 pounds before or after taxes? What kind of tech support is offered? You will want same day or next day support.

Upstream is always crippled compared to downstream for domestic providers.

To effectively host at home you need a business broadband solutions, SDSL or something similar, ADSL tends to limit you to 256kbps upstream, which just ain't enough really.

Have a look at www.star.net.uk - they're one option, but they just fell out of google, so I'd do some proper digging before signing anything.
They're offering up to 2Mbps upstream. However, if you have a cable provider local to you (NTL or similar) have a word with their business relations people. They can sometimes arrange decent bandwidth allocations for cable modems.

The problem with these business solutions is they tend to not like putting them into a house on a residential street, and they cost almost as much as colocation, and you don't get the rental or tech support.

The £400 is a flat purchase, usually with a 1yr return to base warranty. No on-site support. As far as colo costs for a system like that, I don't know - I'd have to do a search.

Yeah, well, when you are running an MMO server you really, really want on site support. It's just not worth it to shut your MMO down for a week or two if something happens to your server.

If I were hosting at home (or at a local office) I could pretty much do the support myself. For getting someone else to do it, you'd pay a premium that when compounded with bandwidth costs, makes colocation a more viable option.

Wow. I had forgotten about this thread and comeback to find 23 replies :)

Obviously things can be done smaller and cheaper. But I just copied and pasted the email I got.

Quote: Original post by Raduprv
Look for the magazine Linux Format, EL should be there in the January issue.

Sounds good. That is a sister magazine to PC Format, right? Did you get them interested too - I know they're pretty big in the UK.


Do you (and others) have EL as a full-time job or is your development work still secondary to some 'normal' job?

It's not yet our primary job, because the game is free, and we only make money by selling items, so there is no guarantee things will work in the future as they work now.
But I guess when we will have over 1.5K players, I will quit my main job to work at EL fulltime.

I just found that article about Eve Online, speaking about their hardware, architecture system, and some nice stats about their database transactions:

Problem: 17,000 concurrent users causing sluggish OLTP response

Y.

Ysaneya - good post!

Here's synopsis of the article for lazy readers: ;-)

Eve Online had DB access issues - disk access queues were reaching 40, where the recommended point for upgrading is 3. (Heavy overload). Players were getting unhappy as some features were taking 20 seconds to complete. This was risky for the business (people were starting to think the whole thing sucked).

They fit an INSANELY FAST SOLID STATE DRIVE into their most overloaded server (looks to be a central DB of some sort) and get a 40x (4000%) improvement in its performance. CPP (Eve's developers) got a big thumbs up from their user base for improving the speed of the game and everybody lived happily ever after.

Quite how expensive that drive is isn't actually listed, so I guess it's a case of 'if you have to ask...'. Eve's problems were occuring when they had something in the regions of 15,000 concurrent connections to the same grid. Which is a silly number - indies will be lucky if they get 10% of that to a grid.

That is not to say that the problem can't occur in microcosm - a poorly designed architecture that relies heavily on disk access (for example using file access where a better solution might cache the appropriate tables in RAM) or an under-spec'ed server with not enough RAM would both lay heavy usage on file access. RAID setups might partially alleviate it, but it's still worth bearing in mind reliance on slow storage in your architecture - as CCP's experience shows this can affect your customer base, and therefore your business.

Quote: Original post by _winterdyne_
Quite how expensive that drive is isn't actually listed, so I guess it's a case of 'if you have to ask...'.

$100k for an older model! But it is very much a case of if you have to ask for the 400 model... Nowhere lists the price!

Interesting information in this thread, lots of useful info, even for people that aren't creating MMO's!