What do you Recommend for a server host and server hardware?

[Auric]

I am planning on running a small to medium sized server soon but before I do that I've got a few thing's I'd like to learn first. Currently my biggest concern is hosts/servers. I wouldn't want to waste money on a failed server because it was too laggy to play on.

For about 20-25 people on at peak times what would you recommend for server hardware?
What host would you recommend?

 

[ayeso]

I have a I5 2400, 8GB Ram running linux with a ramdisk. I can handle about 20ish without any lag. Once it gets close to 30 I get a bit of lag here and there.

 

[zekesonxx]

I run on a 1GB VPS, I get at most 10 players online at once no problem.

 

[DZCreeper]

OP, you got a max budget for this sort of thing? Cause you will be paying directly out of pocket for this, and not a lot of people have large amounts of money laying around for trivial things. Just don't expect people to donate, because I have seen many vanilla and modded servers fail quite quickly doing subscription based payments.

If you want to play with something that won't lag with 20 to 25 people, thats big money, no questions. I am sure you have heard of ForgeCraft, where the mod devs and their friends hang out. Thats the size of server you are talking about, and they pitched in a lot of money to buy that server.

As for actual hardware suggestions.

8 gigs of Ram or higher.
Once people start going to other dimensions and building large scale automation things, then memory plays a bigger role.

Solid State Drive, something like Samsung 830 or 840 is nice. You could even get 2 matching drives and put them in Raid 0, but if 1 drive fails, both go down.
Raid 0 = Big Performance Increase in Chunk Loading

Stupid fast internet connection, hopefully at least 100 mbps up and down.
Also reliable, try to find a host thats running on fibre connections, they tend to have low ping.

A recent CPU that has high single thread performance. If your willing to experiment with Tick Threading and a custom bat file, then extra cores might be useful.
Just keep in mind Tick Threading is unstable atm.

A larger hard disk drive to store backups from the SSD.
Not needed, but if the SSD('s) ever fail your players will be grateful to not lose all their stuff.

 

[ayeso]

Like I said I run 20-25 people on my server with no lag. I5 2400, 8GB ram with Tickthreading and have no stability issues. I have around 98.5% uptime.

 

[FizzX]

Similarly, any recommendations hardware-wise for a smaller group? Probably max 4 players, but we tend to have a handful of dimensions on the go at once, and very heavy on the automation.

 

[jasonmicron]

I run mine out of my own house, but it's roughly small time, maybe 3-5 players max. I run an I7 3700 (non-K) with 32 GB RAM. I then run two servers in virtual instances, everything on Linux, on an LVM disk partitioning scheme using Xen Virtualization. I like to make my life unnecessarily complicated, but it makes backing up and rebuilding the entire server a snap by just restoring a snapshot of the server.

The actual game is stored on an external NAS in RAID-5, and is mounted by the instances via NFS. Backups are run 3 times daily to an external hard drive. I like redundancy.

Each instance, one for Vanilla Mineceraft and one for Feed The Beast, is each allocated 10GB RAM and two cores out of 8 total. Probably overkill for the Vanilla instance, but whatever.

My upload speed from my ISP is 1MB, so I can't have a lot of traffic out of my house any way. But it works, and I haven't had problems.

 

[AlloysRS]

I would say if thats the peak, the usual should be 10-20 or so and i would therefore recommend a 2GB server.
Im sponsored by peak-hosting and therefore i can get you 20% off for the first month.
Usually a 2GB Server is $19.95 a month, the host can help you with everything ftb related.
Use discount code "Titanium20" for an initial 20% discount.

 

[Эрик]

20-25 people is not a big deal IF everybody is not in their own personal dimension. That will be one of the biggest strains on your server if everybody has their own personal mystcraft age.
Somewhere in the range of 3-4 gigabytes of RAM maybe 2 gb will be good for memory. You're going to want a fairly powerful cpu processor, over 3.0 GHz would be helpful. I would say a 1Gbps upload/download link would be what you would need for that many players with all the mods especially if you're going to have multiple worlds, since a lot of mods stuff the network full of events.
You're looking at a budget anywhere from $18-$40 a month, dependent upon who you go with and what you decide to buy.
The only thing that will come second to that is chunk generation. Vanilla minecraft by default, completely sucks in terms of properly utilizing hardware. With 20-25 people you should probably look at something like this http://ci.md-5.net/job/MCPC-Plus/

That would be your minecraft_server.jar or whatever the ftb pack names its server jar files.

You may or may not need a dedicated server. I run a server with about half that amount of players and everything works fine no lag except for on chunk generation.

 

[mmorton89]

20-25 people is not a big deal IF everybody is not in their own personal dimension. That will be one of the biggest strains on your server if everybody has their own personal mystcraft age.
Somewhere in the range of 3-4 gigabytes of RAM maybe 2 gb will be good for memory. You're going to want a fairly powerful cpu processor, over 3.0 GHz would be helpful. I would say a 1Gbps upload/download link would be what you would need for that many players with all the mods especially if you're going to have multiple worlds, since a lot of mods stuff the network full of events.
You're looking at a budget anywhere from $18-$40 a month, dependent upon who you go with and what you decide to buy.
The only thing that will come second to that is chunk generation. Vanilla minecraft by default, completely sucks in terms of properly utilizing hardware. With 20-25 people you should probably look at something like this http://ci.md-5.net/job/MCPC-Plus/

That would be your minecraft_server.jar or whatever the ftb pack names its server jar files.

You may or may not need a dedicated server. I run a server with about half that amount of players and everything works fine no lag except for on chunk generation.

This seems wrong, I have a 25 slot mindcrack server and when its full the server uses 4-6 GB of RAM and my xeon e3-1230v2 will get close to 1.00 load average.

As Bevo said, 20-25 players is a lot for heavily modded minecraft and with that many players you will want a dedicated machine with at least 8 GB of RAM, SSD, good upload speeds and a newer CPU.

 

[MRHeavyMetal_SIR]

i recommend Get-Sourced without a second thought! i have been through my fair share of server hosts and these are the best by far!! starting at as little as £8 a month for 1Gb of ram with SSD as standard on all Minecraft hosting.
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[ayeso]

This seems wrong, I have a 25 slot mindcrack server and when its full the server uses 4-6 GB of RAM and my xeon e3-1230v2 will get close to 1.00 load average.

As Bevo said, 20-25 players is a lot for heavily modded minecraft and with that many players you will want a dedicated machine with at least 8 GB of RAM, SSD, good upload speeds and a newer CPU.

Im with you on this one. For the mindcrack pack at least you need a dedicated machine and 8GB ram for 20+ players. I run about 25-30 on mine. I previously had issues going above 20 on a older dedicated server.

 

[Эрик]

This seems wrong, I have a 25 slot mindcrack server and when its full the server uses 4-6 GB of RAM and my xeon e3-1230v2 will get close to 1.00 load average.

As Bevo said, 20-25 players is a lot for heavily modded minecraft and with that many players you will want a dedicated machine with at least 8 GB of RAM, SSD, good upload speeds and a newer CPU.

It passed over me that mindcrack uses two lagfest mods, twilight forest and portalgun. If you keep those mods enabled, then yeah you're going to need at least 5GB of ram probably closer to 6gb and maybe even more if you keep the server on vanilla minecraft in so far as how the code runs. This would be if you keep those two mods enabled. With those disabled I can see you on 4gb, possibly 3gb with MCPC+ and an additional cpu core allocated to your instance if your host will allow it. Not 2gb of ram though, I definitely will redact saying that particularly if you decide to run any plugins.

 

[Auric]

Thanks everyone for the replies (and sorry I never replied myself) but due to a lack of time and money I'd be unable to continue with this. Perhaps one day, but not at this time.

 

[pirita]

https://vortexservers.com/clients/aff.php?aff=221

 

[kev12east]

anyone know of ways to port forward so that you can run a computer on your local system?

 

[DZCreeper]

Da fuck you high on?

anyone know of ways to port forward so that you can run a computer on your local system?

Sure, just send me $200 dollars to my paypal, and I will put a computer inside of your existing computer, its sure to double the performance.

Anyways, I assume you mean run a server on your local system. I can't honestly tell you, its on a per router basis.

 

[kev12east]

Da fuck you high on?


Sure, just send me $200 dollars to my paypal, and I will put a computer inside of your existing computer, its sure to double the performance.

Anyways, I assume you mean run a server on your local system. I can't honestly tell you, its on a per router basis.

yeah, I meant server; and when i checked on that portforwarding site on the minecraft wiki...no support for my modem

 

[DZCreeper]

Whats the model number, I dig out random pieces of info from the intertube thingy on a regular basis.

 

[Sertas]

I have a I5 2400, 8GB Ram running linux with a ramdisk. I can handle about 20ish without any lag. Once it gets close to 30 I get a bit of lag here and there.

What linux distro are you using? I'm setting up a server and have tried installing Ubuntu, with no luck, and I've installed Fedora but I don't really like the GUI. I know I can change it; I'm a linux newb and that makes finding things a little more difficult....lol