FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

(offer suspended)

Your offer looks so proffessional that i have the doubt that if this is a paid service... (Without offense, this looks so professional, that i was justly wondering...)

Ah.. sorry, I removed prices because I thought it was not appropriate....

I have put them back, so to be clear, it is a pay-for venture.

I want to strike a balance where I can recoup the costs of hosting, but also cheap enough for some people to spend on....

I think hosting at home is probably a good option for small servers, but might not scale well if you are trying to make a highly popular service.

I also do hosting for other applications, and I decided there to do hosting on a "resource consumption" basis instead of a "features" basis, for MineTest.

Funny, i also had the plan to start those kind of service since i think that minetesthosting.com doesnt gives the e.g. performance peoples deserve. But many factors didn't let me do this 'til now... .

Milan - nothing is stopping you :)

If you have a good idea on how to do it, you should implement it! The more people can host professional-grade servers, the more the Minetest community grows :-)

If it means you are offering a similar service as I am, that can only be good, it means people can choose!

If it means you are offering a similar service as I am, that can only be good, it means people can choose!

Well, maybe one step more, i would juse the ssdb nosql database server and ssd for example.

The more people can host professional-grade servers, the more the Minetest community grows :-)

Are you sure? It currently feels like more servers (and growing) as there are even players... .

Milan* wrote:Are you sure? It currently feels like more servers (and growing) as there are even players... .

Chickens and eggs :-)

Yes there are many servers, but how many of them are significant? I am aware that there's Maikerumine's servers (20+ users at any time), the MTForFun group (20+), TPS (15+ at peak) and Xanadu (10+, no pun) which seem to take some traction but they are all very different, so offer something different from eachother and under constant development. I think growing those numbers further is important.

Many servers (most) are non-noticeable. Many people host, only some stick. But the more we have people who want to put an Experience out there, the better.

I am betting that there are some people who are willing to put (small) money towards servers who want to bring a New Experience to the Minetest crowd.

TBH I don't expect any half-hearted persons to take me up on my sale. But I do expect to really passionate people who want to make a Great Minetest Experience first and foremost, might try to find some community-minded provider to build a world in.

And I hope to kickstart that part of things... :-)

Hm... you got an interesting point, maybe i will rethink my decision.... .

Oh by the way (and sorry for the doublepost), you may need to thing about more GHz since the serverthread is only _one_ single thread. Depending on the modload, every MHz is important. :)

Yes I was wondering about that.... would be nice for MT to become multithreaded one day :-P or even better, support some form of clustering!

I can't do much on the CPU side of things directly, but I could probably look at different VPS providers...

I could only recommend german providers since i never tried some from somewhere else...
One thing = ovh is bad.

Milan* wrote:One thing = ovh is bad.

OK. I thought that was just my opinion. Thanks for confirming ;-)

that builder program of yours looks interesting, not sure I have fully understood it yet though ;-P

I agree that the more possabilities there are to easily host a server the better. What could set such a service appart might be the extras that are a little more difficult to set up or keep on schedule. The first thing that comes to my mind is you could offer some sort of automatic backup system. A plus might also be a standard package to setup an IRC connection for the server chat or some sort of shared audio service such as Mumble or Teamspeak. Together with the world backup system an offline overview map service might also be of interest for people who may need help with that. I am pretty sure that there would be a lot of extras many a would be server owner would like to provide but lacks either the knowledge to set it up or the time to maintain it. Offering service solutions for this might garner some more interest in your enterprise. ;-P

twoelk wrote:that builder program of yours looks interesting, not sure I have fully understood it yet though ;-P

Yeah I added that as an afterthought, I need to refine it.....

twoelk wrote:some sort of automatic backup system.

Yep..... still have to figure out how to work that on a live server. Probably will involve some stuff at filesystem level.... tests needed. I guess I can put it on a "upcoming standard features" list...

twoelk wrote:A plus might also be a standard package to setup an IRC connection for the server chat

.... I was meant to highlight that as standard. thanks for reminding me

twoelk wrote:some sort of shared audio service such as Mumble or Teamspeak.

I agree this would be nice, but..... running the audio server would be a biut more hassle, not to mention hardly anyone knows how to use Mumble so doesn't really add...... can be a separate engagement.

twoelk wrote:an offline overview map service might also be of interest

I know there's a "live" mapping tool somewhere I have yet to find and test....

Thanks for the suggestions :-)

I know there's a "live" mapping tool somewhere I have yet to find and test....

https://bitbucket.org/s_l_teichmann/mtsatellite

But i prefer an independent database backend, map the world at one time a day and tile it after that.
Works not live but good: https://illuna-minetest.tk/map

Yep..... still have to figure out how to work that on a live server. Probably will involve some stuff at filesystem level.... tests needed. I guess I can put it on a "upcoming standard features" list...

If you use sqlite, it might be hard 'til impossible to make a live backup as far as i know.
But if you use another backend like Postgres, it is no problem.
If you need help, just pm me somewhere.

...Maybe we could run our hosting projects together^^

Ive been running my servers on leveldb but using postgresql could be of interest... though i have no experience there.

But the data is more thN the db as most mods write to files.... so a fs level snapshot is still necessary....

Another nice thing about the leveldb choice is the 'drop in' ability for managing backups and restores....

I've been made bad experience with leveldb with a nether mod in the past, it corrupted our world, and made huge holes...after that i switched to redis, since redis was somewhen too heavy i migrated to ssdb where i still am... .

I cannot promise that leveldb is was issuemaker there but i read about potential mod incompatibilitys.

My base backup steps:

1. dumping the database to temporally dir
2. copy the worldfolder to the temporally dir
3. tar everything to timestamp.tar.bz2

The problem at this point is that we also have to pay our servers monthly.
This is not cheap and if you want a place on the peoples servers, it would be just kind of you if you help us to keep the machines running - with your money for sure.

Friendship or admin privs are not helping us to solve our costs, please understand this.

Oh and one thing about the admin thing:
Beside that we are keeping the machines stable and secure and have to maintain them every day, your minetestserver would be a tool on the (server)admins machine and he/she has ever control about it.
This is why i told about i can be the admin anyway earlier.

Hey i would create me a own Server but if i test it in the cmd with the commend i don't can me connect with a other computer in the same internet. (i have Windows7 professional)
So can you help me please.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

I know my english is bad.

Make a new topic post in the Servers form and people can help :-)

Right. I am going to change this offer now. Nobody has been interested, so nobody so far is affected.

I am going to instead take this particular problem into account: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=15823

I am thinking about developing a solution that solves the above problem, namely how to host a home server when behind a tricky network setup.

I'll probably do something along the lines of 2 EUR per month for the service, for which subscribers will get:

* tech support in getting a mod-less minetest server available publicly
* a promise of 95% uptime of the public component (home component will be under responsibility of the subscriber)
* Over a month's duration if uptime is not totalled to 95%, then 20% fee deducted

That's as cheap as I can make it so far.

Extras may include hosting mod assets on the public server instead of at home, and advice on performance tuning minetest.conf

For hosting on public servers, I am developing a different system that will allow subscribers to admin via FTP. This is likely to be 5 EUR per month, with performance and storage caps.