Question about hosting

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Tylor Smith
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Question about hosting

by Tylor Smith » Post

I had a few questions for you all, about server hosting.
I would like to try to host a small server for me and less than 10 friends. I am interested in using a VPS, because I don't want to leave my computer on, and also I don't have any internet except my phone hotspot right now.
What is a good VPS option? Are any of the options from this website [https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/] a good idea?
Also, if I decided to make the server more public in the future, would I need to upgrade? Which plan would you recommend for a more public server?

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Blockhead
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Re: Question about hosting

by Blockhead » Post

Good VPS options will depend on your target region. To oversimplify, there are basically the mainstream cloud providers then a few tiers of VPS providers: global, continental, country/small size. These are artificial categories I'm making up and providers don't have to fit perfectly into them. Also, costs of VPSes in a country/region will always be related to the abundance or scarcity of datacentre space in that area; personally I have to pay a big "Australia tax" to get something in Sydney instead of overseas. Also you need to understand terminology like vCPU (virtual CPU core which are shared between VMs) and dedicated, and how much storage you need.

You can also use more mainstream cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud as a VPS provider. Oracle Cloud even has a good deal on their free tier of up to 4 CPU cores and 24 GB of RAM under Arm architecture, which is compatible with Minetest. There's a termination clause for low CPU usage in their fine print though, so be aware. Also Oracle's firewall is complicated to configure, whereas most providers you can use ufw out of the box. Since you aren't paying them, Oracle and other providers free is very unlikely to give you any/good support and you will have to use a lot of searching around the net for sysadmin stuff if you can't figure it out yourself.

The global providers have offerings in the world's most popular locations and have the best self-service technology with control panels, scaling and so on. Their support can be good but impersonal, or it can be neglected and bad, depending on how much cost-cutting they are engaged in. Their prices are usually okay against competition but you can often find better deals in the lower tiers, with caveats. OVH which you linked are in that global tier. Global providers usually have more offerings than just VPSes like separate storage, firewalls and other products. OVH, Vultr, Digital Ocean and others fit in this category.

The continental providers have a lot of offerings in different major cities across a larger but not global area, like a continent like Europe or North America. They have decent self-service control panels and usually quite competitive pricing as can be the owners of their own datacentres and not merely renting space. Their support can be quite good, and you might have a bit more personality than the global providers. This tier includes providers like Hetzner, Netcup in Europe and there may be others in North America, Asia, the Middle East and South America but I'm not an expert.

Lastly you have the smaller players and single-country providers. These often rent datacentre space from a datacentre operator, or on-sell cloud servers from a big provider. They can be as small as only a few people, and they can get quite personal in email support and so on, but that doesn't always mean they will be helpful. They aren't always able to offer great prices either, since they are basically resellers with a big fixed cost to their rack space. This tier include hosters who specialise in particular games like the 1-2 specialist Minetest operators; those kind of hosters will understand what you're trying to do and can offer things like pre-installing mods for you. Other, slightly bigger, providers offer a few locations in a particular country and a decent deal on the server itself, but don't include a lot of the useful features that you get with premium plans, like automatic backups, scaling, and proprietary management software like cPanel. These providers also tend to offer more vCPU offerings than dedicated CPU to cut cost.

This is all pretty general but this is the market for VPSes as I understand it. If someone else has mistakes in my writing to correct or more info to add, feel free to chime in.

Addendum: Oh and to discuss specs: for Minetest it really heavily depends on how many users you want to support online at one time and what game and mods you will be using. Minetest Game with no mods is quite lightweight, while heavily modded MTG/MineClone2 can really chug.
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Festus1965
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Re: Question about hosting

by Festus1965 » Post

most VPS will do for max 10 gamer,
* keep the server closed to the location where you 10 player are living = low rtt, low distance / transport lag
* check the server-lag impact for your wished mods, if you want to include heave mods you need faster VPS
just this 2 main options how to search ...
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Re: Question about hosting

by L-Dog » Post

Tylor Smith wrote:
Wed May 03, 2023 01:02
I had a few questions for you all, about server hosting.
I would like to try to host a small server for me and less than 10 friends. I am interested in using a VPS, because I don't want to leave my computer on, and also I don't have any internet except my phone hotspot right now.
What is a good VPS option? Are any of the options from this website [https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/] a good idea?
Also, if I decided to make the server more public in the future, would I need to upgrade? Which plan would you recommend for a more public server?
Advise about VPS:

1. my server is Small
System-serer.png
System-serer.png (6.1 KiB) Viewed 3790 times
4 GB ram, 2 Cores.... it can host a server very well...maybe 2 servers without guns.

2. sign a long contract... i paid £250 for 2 year contract, it was cheaper and its easier, im bad with monthly payments, example: if miss one you lose the server... so i opted for longest contract i could sign

3. Type of Server.... you want a 'Root Server' , a machine you have admin control on so you can install, update, modify and run anything... i have 2 scripts that run @reboot - 1 is the minetest game and 2 is the game map.

With a root Server you can host a website or other games

4. Memory... i went for 50Gb, the map file will grow, mines at 8GB now after nearly 2 years

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Re: Question about hosting

by L-Dog » Post

Tylor Smith wrote:
Wed May 03, 2023 01:02
I had a few questions for you all, about server hosting.
I would like to try to host a small server for me and less than 10 friends. I am interested in using a VPS, because I don't want to leave my computer on, and also I don't have any internet except my phone hotspot right now.
What is a good VPS option? Are any of the options from this website [https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/] a good idea?
Also, if I decided to make the server more public in the future, would I need to upgrade? Which plan would you recommend for a more public server?
their deal for 2 years on 2 cores with 4Gb ram is £280... its a big investment.

i mean if you dont care and not a coder.. you dont want back up of game or anything then monthly is fine, if you lose it you wont mind

Tylor Smith
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Re: Question about hosting

by Tylor Smith » Post

Thank you all for your time and your responses, I appreciate it.
@Blockhead: thanks for breaking it down, the information about what my options are is very helpful to know.
Thank you @Festus1965 for the clear and simple options, easy to remember.
And @L-Dog I appreciate the specifics you mentioned. I will keep these in mind as I do more research.
I'm still thinking about what I want to do, but you guys have helped me out a lot.
I'm not sure if I want to try going with any of the 'free trial' options or not. I'm going to look around a little more.
Is there a way to download/save a world, and then load it to a new VPS? For example if I switched services or it went down.
I am not currently a coder :) but I am interested in coding.
Thanks again everyone!

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Re: Question about hosting

by L-Dog » Post

Tylor Smith wrote:
Thu May 04, 2023 15:57

Is there a way to download/save a world, and then load it to a new VPS? For example if I switched services or it went down.
I am not currently a coder :) but I am interested in coding.
Thanks again everyone!
also known as 'Back-up' haha

Yes.. save the World folder.. example '/.minetest/worlds/My_World' .... save 'MY_WORLD' and paste it into any '/.minetest/worlds/...' directory... any 'unknown nodes' mean you need to enable the mod they belong to



there is an error, if you create a world in Minetest 5.7.0 and try to play it in minetest 5.6.0 you will get 'out of date' error... so keep it at the same Minetest Version

Tylor Smith
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Re: Question about hosting

by Tylor Smith » Post

Thanks @L-Dog!

Ok here are 2 plans:

2 GB RAM
40 GB SSD Disk space
2 TB Bandwidth
1 Snapshot
Weekly Backups
Dedicated IP Address
Full Root Access

And

4 GB RAM
80 GB SSD Disk space
4 TB Bandwidth
1 Snapshot
Weekly Backups
Dedicated IP Address
Full Root Access

There is also one in between. Thoughts?

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Festus1965
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Re: Question about hosting

by Festus1965 » Post

Tylor Smith wrote:
Thu May 04, 2023 20:28
Thanks @L-Dog!

Ok here are 2 plans:

2 GB RAM
40 GB SSD Disk space
...Full Root Access

And

4 GB RAM
80 GB SSD Disk space
...
Full Root Access

There is also one in between. Thoughts?
I let the main lines for me left in quote
* missing the available CPU Cores or Threads - a server most handle 2 threads with most work and important to run, and sometime with mapgen some more
* if you play with 10 persons same time and different locations 2 GB RAM will be hard to keep all mapblocks in memory
* my world is over 80 GB itself with an age of 8+ years - so where will the backup be stored, if same and with the OS data 40 GB is soon gone

look for another server in the list, we had an old thread about server data or ask for worlds hosted with similar conditions and test that server with your friends to find out if 2 GB RAM, 40 or 4 GB / 80 will be ok for 1 or 2 years

I just want to remind about the price: I host myself and getting an used, 2nd hand server with even better conditions might sound expensive but self hosting is already cheaper in 2 years even with hardware and electric in most cases.
There is no special danger if you use free ubuntu, or linux and you can set a password, and not list it, and even run the server just during the time you and your friends are online. The lower internet connection is not that problem, but you did not mention the bandwith, but 2 MB should already work.
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Tylor Smith
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Re: Question about hosting

by Tylor Smith » Post

Thanks Festus :)
I decided to try out the Google Cloud free trial option. It lets you customize your machine..
But I got stuck, so I have some more questions, that might be dumb.
It's a Debian system, so I followed a tutorial on installing Minetest through snap. Apparently it's installed, but I don't know the commands to access it or work with it since the files seem to be "hidden". There is no GUI installed on the machine right now, and I am trying to figure out how to create a world and install mods from the terminal. Can anyone give me any tips or tell me what I should research? I was planning to follow some videos and tutorials, but got stuck because of the snap.
Should I just try starting over? Maybe I can make a machine with a better system for Minetest than Debian.
Thanks again :)

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Re: Question about hosting

by L-Dog » Post

--- duplicate ---
Last edited by L-Dog on Sun May 07, 2023 01:35, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Question about hosting

by L-Dog » Post

Tylor Smith wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 17:57
Thanks Festus :)
I decided to try out the Google Cloud free trial option. It lets you customize your machine..
But I got stuck, so I have some more questions, that might be dumb.
It's a Debian system, so I followed a tutorial on installing Minetest through snap. Apparently it's installed, but I don't know the commands to access it or work with it since the files seem to be "hidden". There is no GUI installed on the machine right now, and I am trying to figure out how to create a world and install mods from the terminal. Can anyone give me any tips or tell me what I should research? I was planning to follow some videos and tutorials, but got stuck because of the snap.
Should I just try starting over? Maybe I can make a machine with a better system for Minetest than Debian.
Thanks again :)
your first option was Snap?? ...

i would of used:
sudo apt install minetest

might give you 5.6 version, if not you can add Minetests PPA to your repo.

and Yes. Minetest world/Mods directory is Hidden.. its a '.minetest'(the . making it hidden)..but im in this hidden directory everyday.... type this into the terminal
cd ~/.minetest/
ls


'ls' will list your directory to double check where your at.

advice: .. Use apt first.

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Re: Question about hosting

by L-Dog » Post

Tylor Smith wrote:
Sat May 06, 2023 17:57
Thanks Festus :)
I decided to try out the Google Cloud free trial option. It lets you customize your machine..
But I got stuck, so I have some more questions, that might be dumb.
It's a Debian system, so I followed a tutorial on installing Minetest through snap. Apparently it's installed, but I don't know the commands to access it or work with it since the files seem to be "hidden". There is no GUI installed on the machine right now, and I am trying to figure out how to create a world and install mods from the terminal. Can anyone give me any tips or tell me what I should research? I was planning to follow some videos and tutorials, but got stuck because of the snap.
Should I just try starting over? Maybe I can make a machine with a better system for Minetest than Debian.
Thanks again :)
To CD (change Directory) in Minetest
CD Minetest.gif
CD Minetest.gif (21.43 KiB) Viewed 3625 times
to boot a world up in terminal
Start world.gif
Start world.gif (334.25 KiB) Viewed 3625 times
i done this to help show you

Tylor Smith
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Re: Question about hosting

by Tylor Smith » Post

Thanks @L-Dog! I will try this!

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Re: Question about hosting

by LRV » Post

Moved to 'Problems'.
This is a cool signature. :)

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