Also, what if you have players that don't want to bother with protections. They devote their limited play time to building, mining, and crafting, not learning protection plugins or generating power for a forcefield.
What kind of memory requirements are you finding with MCPC+? I have tried running it on my staging server, and had to bump the RAM to 3GB just to get it to boot with a few plugins and no players. Even after removing all the bukkit plugins, It still was extremely stable at 2GB. Random crashes were pretty normal whenever I would try to visit my mining well turtle setup. I couldn't even get it to start at all at BeastNode, until they told me to use the Hexxit config and rename the .jar ... PermGen space would run out as it was preparing spawn, and BN refused to bump it up or create an MCPC specific jar.conf to help me out. I will probably move to MC Pro Hosting, but that's another kettle of fish entirely.
I'm running a Direwolf20 1.5.2 v2 1.1.3 FTB server right now, but it's whitelisted until I can get some basic protections in place. There is another user on this forum who has rewritten GP for FTB, and I will probably use that fork rather than the official fork for the reasons you listed as he provides the GP config and the patched .jar. If you're interested, I'll dig through and find the thread again.
I appreciate the list of mods. Essentials does seem like a huge PITA to get working with forge, and if I can get around it, that would be awesome!
Are you using anything to provide commands similar to /home, /repair, /i etc? Is that kind of stuff included with CommandBook by default?
I'm running it fine on a 2GB Ramnode VPS:
Unleashed 1.1.4, 20 players on. PermGen and OOMs sound like an overselling issue with your host.
Don't get me started on BN ... I'm quite confident they are overselling.
How do you like Ramnode? I have always been skeptical of the performance running Minecraft on a VPS, but it looks like Ramnode has really tuned I/O for speed. Are you running MCPC+ with Unleashed? I can run DW20 in 2GB, no problem, it's when I add in MCPC+ and some bukkit plugins that it starts to run out-of-memory.
My staging server is a Dell 2950 w/ dual quad core 2.5Ghz Xeon's, 16GB RAM, 4x73GB 15k SAS drives in RAID 10 running Debian. It's sitting in the rack here in my office, so I can guarantee it's not oversold I'm using Multicraft there so I can more easily manage copies of all the production servers in one place. I do all my testing on this server before pushing out to BeastNode where the production servers live. It makes it easier to try new things, spectacularly fail, and not piss off the users or lose data. I make nightly snapshots of all the servers which get pushed out remote, so I use those snapshots on staging to do my testing with. Probably overkill for minecraft, but if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. It has saved our bacon more than once, including just a couple weeks ago when the ForceOP auth exploit attack tool was released, and someone impersonated our owner and proceeded to destroy the map with the help of some other kiddos ... Hence the desire to get some protections in place on FTB before opening it up to the world as we have been the target of griefers more than once.
Even ridiculously cheap VPSes are probably less oversold than most "Minecraft hosts". They're decently priced with the VPSB35 coupon (not affiliate), and have stupid fast (800MB/s+) sync writes.
As you can see, I'm not actually using that many resources. Most of the RAM usage is buffer/cache, and load average is small.
I host major stuff on a OVH MG1, but this little VPS gets much better I/O than even a $250/mo behemoth
Very interesting! Thank you.
Are you running MCPC+ or just the ftb_server.jar that comes with the server pack?
Even ridiculously cheap VPSes are probably less oversold than most "Minecraft hosts". They're decently priced with the VPSB35 coupon (not affiliate), and have stupid fast (800MB/s+) sync writes.
As you can see, I'm not actually using that many resources. Most of the RAM usage is buffer/cache, and load average is small.
I host major stuff on a OVH MG1, but this little VPS gets much better I/O than even a $250/mo behemoth