[Funding Concerns]

You said the DC is in Beauharnois, QC. That's just south of Montreal. The location highlighted in that map looks around as far north of Montreal as Florida is south of it. Quebec is big.

 

It's also a map of submarine cables, and doesn't have any representation of overland connections.

 

Montreal is close to all the major Northeastern US cities and is closely connected to plenty of North American backbones. It's also a short hop from the main transatlantic cables running from Nova Scotia.

 

The point was that they are not (at all) the same place. There is a distance between current location and BHS of approximately 2,500 miles.

 

While I don't personally reside in the United States, route traces from various servers I own around that country show a (noticeable for a game like Minecraft) difference. Obviously, they're all overland connections. I'm glad you noted that the only important metric is the lack of overland connections, showing once again that the United States is the only country that matters.

 

From my country to the Phoenix versus my country to Quebec, it's about 100ms difference.

[Funding Concerns]

Canada is in North America.

 

While I too enjoy a joke from time to time about the perceived irrelevancy of other countries, please refer to this map and tell me that the routing from Arizona is the same as the routing from Quebec.

[Funding Concerns]

I wish I had the irc logs of an earlier conversation, but I'll summarize below what I said then:

 

As I said, our current box is good for the price we pay ( $238 ). Alternatives would be SingleHop and FutureServers however for the amount of ram we currently have neither host can beat SecuredServers on price. We could look at moving to OVH if we wanted to change the landscape of our server a bit but there is little incentive at the moment. We could look at moving back to Incero where we originally were hosted some 3-4 years ago, but we were unhappy enough with them to move, moving back wouldn't be a decision made lightly.

 

Now I know why you were asking me for US dedi hosts. I actually meant FutureHosting. FutureServers is overpriced (and not the same).

 

SingleHop is absolutely outstanding. Their network and hardware are second only to Rackspace and Softlayer (which are probably way out of nerd.nu's price point, but I'd recommend them nontheless).

 

I wouldn't recommend Incero because while I haven't used them myself, everyone I know has problems with Gordon (the owner) for some reason. The DC they're in, SecuredServers, is where nerd.nu is now.

[Funding Concerns]

I'd like to recommend ways of cost cutting through server hosting.

 

One thing I found was https://ggservers.net/

Max cost would be $85 per month for a 400 player capacity or scale it down to a 144 player capacity at $36 a month

 

Since C, and S rarely go over 50 players, you can do the 60 player plan for $15 a month.

 

 

 

So Lets break down some costs.

 

PvE: $85 per month (if you do the 400 player capacity)

C: $15 a month (60 Player Capacity)

S: $15 a month (60 player capacity)

Lobby: $36 a month (if you do the 144 player capacity)

 

 

So totaling that up comes down to $151 a month in expenses.

 

 

 

 

As for web hosting, Most expensive that I see is $6.99 a month

https://ggservers.net/webhosting.html

 

 

$151 + $6.99 = $157.99 per month.

 

$157.99 x 12 = $1,895.88 per year.

 

 

Now that's quite the difference from the $3,700 per year quote. That's about a difference of $1,804.12 and that's how much we can save, while providing better servers with more draw distance and minimal lag.

It would be a much better user experience at a much better cost.

 

(Ex-)sysadmin here!

 

Garbage.

 

Their "North American" IP is owned by OVH. OVH don't have anything in North America. Their closest DC is in Beauharnois, Quebec, Canada. The peering information for the test IP they provide (192.99.14.127) shows it most certainly is in Canada.

 

While OVH in itself isn't that bad and boasts a >200Gbit DDoS mitigation backbone, there's no way GGServers, who hide their domain WHOIS information, and post a fake address on their website, are providing the service they offer making a return. Not for the prices they (he?) charge(s).

 

Sorry guys, your options are pretty limited for what you need. You've made some decisions that could've taken a bit more thought (IP.Board, the random $70/mo box).

 

What tells you that it'll be better user experience?

 

edit: Please can people provide some sort of uptime chart for any new hosters they suggest? OVH or some other name of theirs had downtime yesterday.

 

Pretty much everything. Web hosting providers are a dime for ten dozen. The best ones make it around via word of mouth.

 

Nerd.nu needs to see what comes out of this latest fundraiser and reconsider its options, hardware and otherwise.

 

--EDIT--

 

While I didn't want to turn this post into a floodfest of irrelevancy, I was encouraged to share a few things I found while researching further into ggservers. I guess this is relevant to tobylane too in that you really have to trust a brand (or the person behind it) before you throw everything away on price.

 

I did a bit of digging attempting to find the panel for ggservers. Unrelatedly, c45y found the status page asking who they were hosting with in Nevada. Four seconds later I discovered that the panels (because having only one panel is for amateurs) are listed sequentially by their ID as a subdomain of ggservers.net (e.g., panel1.ggservers.net). A quick lookup of panel7 (the Nevada) panel revealed they're with another fairly reputable host. The only problem is that the reverse DNS record shows some pretty interesting, unrelated-to-minecraft, results. Given the IP address disparity I can't say for sure whether or not those boxes are 100% owned, leased, or "borrowed".

[Public chat moderation is done poorly]

Ever fired up a multiplayer game and thought "hey, I wish these people were less social"? Me neither.

Catering to the lowest-common denominator of people and "muh feelings" isn't exactly a recent trend. It's been going on ever since the rules expanded from the golden rule one of nerd.nu into the long, sprawling labyrinth of corner cases and "staff discretion" that you have now. Some of the rules were actually required because the golden rule, for whatever reason, wasn't cutting it.

Despite some proponents of the nu nerd order claiming that it's just staff abusing their right to kick / ban / mute without oversight, the apparently vexing problem of putting aside your unwarranted self-importance for a few moments to consider that maybe a comment about race / religion / sexual orientation wasn't actually a targeted backhand remark is pretty much the core cause of the entire issue. Sometimes people say something deliberately venomous (in the heat of the moment or not) and should most certainly be forced to take a time-out from the community, but discussing anything that isn't deliberately inciteful, targeted, or containing malicious undertones should not be censored. I could go on about some amendment or other that is potentially tangentially relevant, but the actual problem this causes is more directly related to the servers.

Generally, "multiplayer" indicates that you'll be playing the game with other people. Those people, like most other mammals, are social. They talk. They talk about a lot of things, from what they had for breakfast to their interpretation of Luke 24. You know what the biggest and best indicator of a game server's size is? How active it is. Ever since some genius discovered the previously considered-impossible fact that you could forge the player stats on just about any game server, it's come down to people jumping on to check it out. New players cannot even approach caring about "clan chat, whatever that is". They just want to see if the server is going to be right for them.

This just in: Nobody really plays multiplayer wanting silence. That's what singleplayer is for. If you want to play with people but without chat, here's an idea: Disable the chat. Alternatively, use the ignore list like a capable human being.

Segregating the life out of any and all chat doesn't just make the server look dead, it actually makes it really inconvenient for players in more than one channel. For the record, that's basically anyone who doesn't roleplay living in a city that has a clanchat. You can't just tab between channels like you can with some IRC clients or Facebook Messenger. You actually have to type some ridiculous slash-command in order to switch your "target", then talk into that channel. Many people have been around for years and even they still couldn't care less about clanchat. It was an average fix for the non-problem of groups of friends communicating out-of-band on the survival server. Last I checked, that's what Mumble, Skype, and every other communications software under the Sun was for. It's actually fewer keystrokes to alt-tab out of Minecraft and into Mumble, type a reply, and alt-tab back in than it is to switch clanchat channels, type your message, then (maybe) switch back. I'd rather just use general chat to be honest, or Mumble, because I like hearing the sound of my own voice. It's the best. You should hear it.

The lack of social awareness demonstrated by anyone suggesting that you should squirrel away individual chats into little pockets is palpable. If you want your server to look like it's a bunch of wannabe secret societies pretending not to play a video game on the same box, go right ahead. The staff shouldn't be making wild stabs in the dark about the future of a discussion, they should be watching it if they're worried it'll go off course. Yes, watching it. How revolutionary; the community janitors have to sometimes act as community janitors. Don't want to monitor trouble? Quit, play on another account, or disclaim liability for upset players because you're busy building a tower.