Anyone know what hosting company small to medium sizish multiplayer games are using? I''ve estimated that a typical MMORPG supporting 1,000 users online simultaneously would require at least an 8Mb pipe. Research I''ve done says this will cost anywhere from $8,000/mo (on the optimistic low end) to $30,000/month. I hope I''m wrong! DavidRM, who do you use? Do you have a dedicated connection or do you have a colocated server at an ISP? That seems prohibitively expensive for an MMORPG because of the typical transfer limits, but I imagine Artifact doesn''t use nearly as much bandwidth...?

We have migrated through several hosting companies over the years. For the last year or so we''ve been hosted by WebServePro. They''ve worked well for us, and they''ve cut us a few deals over time. We''re not their highest bandwidth user, I don''t think, but we rank in there somewhere.

Server hardware itself is just Linux boxes with 850MHz CPUs, 512MB RAM and a few GB hard drive space. Backbone is through Genuity and I have no idea what their max pipe size is. Genuity is "mostly stable". Not sure I like ''em yet.

We chew up about 300K bps (bits per second) with our 3 servers running 35 games, averaging about 80-100 players online 24x7 (peaking around 150 online at once).

Using our usage and bandwidth numbers and your 1000 players online average assumption, that comes to about a 3M bps pipe...or about 2 T1''s. Not too bad, and less than half your 8M-bit pipe estimate.

What you need to do is come up with a maximum bandwidth used per player and stick to it...even if it means "throttling" a player''s usage somewhat (we do that on Artifact). You really do need to make sure each player uses as little bandwidth as possible. Optimize and compress as much as you can. Then look to see what else you can do. We''re about to start a new round of profiling Artifact''s bandwidth usage to see what we can reduce or eliminate.

Start small and move up. No reason to try to emulate EQ''s "server farms" right from the beginning. For testing, you probably need only a single server and very little overall bandwidth. As you bring more of the game online and your player base grows, you can always expand.



DavidRM
Samu Games

If your looking for good hosting on a co-location than check out www.inetgroup.com. Not only do they do co-location they have hosting solutions that will gurenteed keep your costs down well below what your talking. They are running off an 8M pipe and have all the bandwidth you could ever use. One thing to keep in mind is that it's a canadian company. If you want information directly contact them at 1-250-763-1062.

And no I do not own it, but yes they may have a couple of Big white passes included... It belongs to my uncle...
And I use it very often.

Edited by - Mmeltdown on March 29, 2001 1:12:18 PM

Gee Meltdown, was that a shameless plug? And they''re in Kelowna... hmmmm, I wonder if they have Big White season passes...

Only 300Kbps! Geez David... at that bandwidth you could practically run it off a DSL line.