01-17-2023, 10:49 AM
I normally wouldn't make such a thread, but today I read a message on the Fresh Meat server that it will be shut down due to an excessive cost of $30 per month. This is not the first time that such news hit. Few people seem to know that:
A perfectly running 100% & 24/7 lag-free Xonotic server that supports 16 players costs no more $4.20 a month (often at special price only $1/month).
UPDATE: Right now it looks like $1 is totally overpriced, you get 4 dedicated Ampere/ARM cores with 24GB RAM on a 600Mbit connection in an undercrowded ARM-exclusive datacenter for $0 with Oracle Cloud Forever Free Tier (no hidden cost). That's the same pristine performance as 2-4 root servers. After extensive playtesting, so far everything checks out A+++ .
More details about the solution.
I will leave the rest of the thread as it was before the incredible $0 discovery.
WARNING: We don't know why, but after the free trial expires, some few people had all their servers deleted. Make sure that you never go over the limit, which at the moment is 4 Ampere cores and 24GB RAM total. This might perhaps happen as well if you run a test server with 10 cores just once, but delete it afterwards, within the free trial period. Always do rsync backups.
Another clunk we discovered is that sometimes it keeps the old "boot volumes", thus blocking you from creating new boot volumes for free. Simply delete the old boot volumes under "block storage" to fix this problem. This happens if you create e.g. 4 test servers, then delete the instances, then create 4 new ones. It might explain how people had their servers deleted after the free trial because they were actually overbooking and the new servers were all using storage that would have cost money.
---------- OLD ----------
It is therefore shameful to see long-loved servers with custom mods to shut down, because the server owners were sometimes paying 10x or 50x the actual cost with a better server provider for little to no actual benefit. With the time some of those servers have been running, they would have actually covered the cost for the next 15-100 years with a better provider.
For the last years, I believe the only server that actually *ever* exceeded 16 players at a time and for which the above price would not work out, has been eris/feris. This only proves the point that adding more beef to a server is pointless in almost all situations. I mean yes: maybe Fresh Meat actually one day had 20 players for half an hour or maybe it will have in the future and then with the $1 VPS 4 players will be disappointed because the server limit is only 16. But is it really worth it to pay $30/month instead, for just those very 30 minutes that happen only once or twice a year, and then whine about not being able to cover server cost and shutting it down all together? That is INSANE if you ask me.
Of course I know that most cheap VPS providers suck. If you have tried cheap VPS you know the issue: there is poor load balancing between the customers (not so much a result of cheaping out the service, but rather a result of a shitty setup by the provider), and depending on the hour of the day or day or the week, you will get CPU chokes and lag spikes which can range from "annoying" to "unplayable". To some server admins I imagine, it is therefore a very seductive idea to just throw more and more money at the server hoster and fix the problem that way, which is probably the main reason why most server providers don't bother to fix their shitty setups on the low price tiers.
However, I have been in the IT business and OVH has been the provider of choice for a very long time. Historically speaking, it does not suffer from chokes, there are no lag skips, it just works and this has been so for almost a decade. They only get severe DDOS attacks once or twice a year which can cause lag for 1-2 hours, and sometimes their IPs are shitlisted because not just large businesses rent their servers there for $1000 a month, Joe Average also does. This means in short: the network quality is excellent and identical to a $50 root server.
OVH.com starter VPS is trial and tested for Xonotic, perfect with no drawbacks and many locations all around the world.
As you can see often and right now you get the special reduced price of $1/month for the exact same service, which makes it even more ridiculous and sad for people to pay $50/month instead. The special offer ends on 24.01.2023 14:00, which is 6 days from this posting. I think it occurs annually, or maybe even twice a year or maybe sometimes at random also, I am not exactly sure.
Now I have last tested OVH with Xonotic 0.8.2 in Frankfurt and France, I think a year ago, and I don't want to make any all-time guarantees here as Xonotic changes, the provider might change and it might also vary between locations. So before you start contracting for the next 5 years there, maybe at first use different payment method + credentials to get a test server for just 1 month at $1 or whatever.
But just today I have bought one year for 11 Euros (Frankfurt, Germany), the server is called "Extreme Voltage" and was configured from start to finish in less than 15 minutes via https://github.com/ballerburg9005/xonotic.us.to . We were only 8 players at most for testing, but judging from the CPU usage, 16 players is probably the minimum it will do, somewhere around 75-95% CPU usage. It runs of course butter-smooth as it always has been without any sort of skips or lags or CPU spikes.
I also made a second account under a different name and paid with Paypal instead of credit card to rent a second VPS for a year (Extreme Voltage Duel). I believe it is possible to use the same payment method multiple times with different accounts, but just to be safe, you could make multiple Paypal accounts as well.
I hope you also realize that it is obvously nuts to pay like 5x or 20x the price when the result will be identical 99-100% of the time, with the end result being server shutdown because of excessive cost. Of course if you use the server for other games or heavy stuff also, or if you are the one and only Eris/Feris, then it is not exactly the same matter. Plus you are of course free to personally pay whatever high prices you want where you want. But if it is about going bancrupt, begging or advertising about the money problem (no one in particular implied here) and having popular mods shut down then it should be a community concern and choices should be made foremost by economic criteria.
This is why I find it important that we can figure out a consensus here on which server provider is cheapest and best at a certain player count, because the variation between providers of what you get per dollar amount is absolutely HUMONGOUS. I believe it is very very difficult to contest the $1 VPS from OVH (update: funny how there actually was a $0 Ampere/ARM server with much more beef and even dedicated cores). And otherwise for other providers, it would be just a question of people reporting the numbers and doing the testing 24/7 for a whole week at least to see if the VPS will suffer from chokes and stutters (which most cheap VPS do).
It would be also be great if we could find a cheap provider that can handle more than 16 players (update: done! $0 Ampere/ARM = 32+ players). Even at OVH the twice as powerful server is quadruple the money (and 15x if you calculate bsed on the $1 special) ... so that's kind of a bad deal by comparison. Maybe we can get double the power for double the price (7x vs $1) somewhere else, that would really be a relief. But with time maybe some years down the road the $1 VPS will be twice as fast, probably, so it can only get better from there.
A perfectly running 100% & 24/7 lag-free Xonotic server that supports 16 players costs no more $4.20 a month (often at special price only $1/month).
UPDATE: Right now it looks like $1 is totally overpriced, you get 4 dedicated Ampere/ARM cores with 24GB RAM on a 600Mbit connection in an undercrowded ARM-exclusive datacenter for $0 with Oracle Cloud Forever Free Tier (no hidden cost). That's the same pristine performance as 2-4 root servers. After extensive playtesting, so far everything checks out A+++ .
More details about the solution.
I will leave the rest of the thread as it was before the incredible $0 discovery.
WARNING: We don't know why, but after the free trial expires, some few people had all their servers deleted. Make sure that you never go over the limit, which at the moment is 4 Ampere cores and 24GB RAM total. This might perhaps happen as well if you run a test server with 10 cores just once, but delete it afterwards, within the free trial period. Always do rsync backups.
Another clunk we discovered is that sometimes it keeps the old "boot volumes", thus blocking you from creating new boot volumes for free. Simply delete the old boot volumes under "block storage" to fix this problem. This happens if you create e.g. 4 test servers, then delete the instances, then create 4 new ones. It might explain how people had their servers deleted after the free trial because they were actually overbooking and the new servers were all using storage that would have cost money.
---------- OLD ----------
It is therefore shameful to see long-loved servers with custom mods to shut down, because the server owners were sometimes paying 10x or 50x the actual cost with a better server provider for little to no actual benefit. With the time some of those servers have been running, they would have actually covered the cost for the next 15-100 years with a better provider.
For the last years, I believe the only server that actually *ever* exceeded 16 players at a time and for which the above price would not work out, has been eris/feris. This only proves the point that adding more beef to a server is pointless in almost all situations. I mean yes: maybe Fresh Meat actually one day had 20 players for half an hour or maybe it will have in the future and then with the $1 VPS 4 players will be disappointed because the server limit is only 16. But is it really worth it to pay $30/month instead, for just those very 30 minutes that happen only once or twice a year, and then whine about not being able to cover server cost and shutting it down all together? That is INSANE if you ask me.
Of course I know that most cheap VPS providers suck. If you have tried cheap VPS you know the issue: there is poor load balancing between the customers (not so much a result of cheaping out the service, but rather a result of a shitty setup by the provider), and depending on the hour of the day or day or the week, you will get CPU chokes and lag spikes which can range from "annoying" to "unplayable". To some server admins I imagine, it is therefore a very seductive idea to just throw more and more money at the server hoster and fix the problem that way, which is probably the main reason why most server providers don't bother to fix their shitty setups on the low price tiers.
However, I have been in the IT business and OVH has been the provider of choice for a very long time. Historically speaking, it does not suffer from chokes, there are no lag skips, it just works and this has been so for almost a decade. They only get severe DDOS attacks once or twice a year which can cause lag for 1-2 hours, and sometimes their IPs are shitlisted because not just large businesses rent their servers there for $1000 a month, Joe Average also does. This means in short: the network quality is excellent and identical to a $50 root server.
OVH.com starter VPS is trial and tested for Xonotic, perfect with no drawbacks and many locations all around the world.
As you can see often and right now you get the special reduced price of $1/month for the exact same service, which makes it even more ridiculous and sad for people to pay $50/month instead. The special offer ends on 24.01.2023 14:00, which is 6 days from this posting. I think it occurs annually, or maybe even twice a year or maybe sometimes at random also, I am not exactly sure.
Now I have last tested OVH with Xonotic 0.8.2 in Frankfurt and France, I think a year ago, and I don't want to make any all-time guarantees here as Xonotic changes, the provider might change and it might also vary between locations. So before you start contracting for the next 5 years there, maybe at first use different payment method + credentials to get a test server for just 1 month at $1 or whatever.
But just today I have bought one year for 11 Euros (Frankfurt, Germany), the server is called "Extreme Voltage" and was configured from start to finish in less than 15 minutes via https://github.com/ballerburg9005/xonotic.us.to . We were only 8 players at most for testing, but judging from the CPU usage, 16 players is probably the minimum it will do, somewhere around 75-95% CPU usage. It runs of course butter-smooth as it always has been without any sort of skips or lags or CPU spikes.
I also made a second account under a different name and paid with Paypal instead of credit card to rent a second VPS for a year (Extreme Voltage Duel). I believe it is possible to use the same payment method multiple times with different accounts, but just to be safe, you could make multiple Paypal accounts as well.
I hope you also realize that it is obvously nuts to pay like 5x or 20x the price when the result will be identical 99-100% of the time, with the end result being server shutdown because of excessive cost. Of course if you use the server for other games or heavy stuff also, or if you are the one and only Eris/Feris, then it is not exactly the same matter. Plus you are of course free to personally pay whatever high prices you want where you want. But if it is about going bancrupt, begging or advertising about the money problem (no one in particular implied here) and having popular mods shut down then it should be a community concern and choices should be made foremost by economic criteria.
This is why I find it important that we can figure out a consensus here on which server provider is cheapest and best at a certain player count, because the variation between providers of what you get per dollar amount is absolutely HUMONGOUS. I believe it is very very difficult to contest the $1 VPS from OVH (update: funny how there actually was a $0 Ampere/ARM server with much more beef and even dedicated cores). And otherwise for other providers, it would be just a question of people reporting the numbers and doing the testing 24/7 for a whole week at least to see if the VPS will suffer from chokes and stutters (which most cheap VPS do).
It would be also be great if we could find a cheap provider that can handle more than 16 players (update: done! $0 Ampere/ARM = 32+ players). Even at OVH the twice as powerful server is quadruple the money (and 15x if you calculate bsed on the $1 special) ... so that's kind of a bad deal by comparison. Maybe we can get double the power for double the price (7x vs $1) somewhere else, that would really be a relief. But with time maybe some years down the road the $1 VPS will be twice as fast, probably, so it can only get better from there.