Quite recently, I got myself this dedicated server. As I was too busy at the time, and saw CommanderKeith’s game, which desperately needed some reliable public server, I offered him a tiny share of mine. This was a great experience, as it turned out to be rather tricky to get things running, which would have been much harder without access to a public server. Anyway, I think there might be a demand for such a service, that delivers a minimal share of a server, for a minimal fee - hopefully just to cover the costs of my dedicated server.
I had this idea to get some feedback from the community, before I would put a lot of effort into building the website. So here it is:
Service: a sandboxed JVM on a public server
[quote]To support multiplayer in your games, you probably want a public server to connect all players to eachother. The costs and maintainance of a dedicated server, or a VirtualPrivateServer is often a big turnoff. Normally you’d only use minimal resources, to run your matching-service, chatroom or simple gameserver.
What you might need is a service that allows you to use minimal resources on a public server. For a minimal fee of 5 EUR / month, you can run your own Java application, hosting 2 serversockets, within a sandbox, on a dedicated server.
To ensure everybody gets their fair share of performance, the following rules apply:
Available CPU resources (DELL Dual XEON 3.2 GHz):
- 66% average usage in 3 seconds
- 20% average usage in 10 seconds
- 5% average usage in 60 seconds
- 2% average usage in 3600 seconds
Available bandwidth:
- 5000kB/s average throughput in 3 seconds
- 1500kB/s average throughput in 10 seconds
- 500kB/s average throughput in 60 seconds
- 100kB/s average throughput in 3600 seconds
- 250MB traffic per day
Available resources:
- max 48MB Java-heap, 4MB direct-memory
- two serversockets for incoming TCP connections (port 1024+)
- 250MB harddisk space (read/write access in your own user-directory)
- the STDOUT and STDERR as streams visible by a webbrowser, and as downloadable files after the process is terminated.
Runtime restrictions:
- once you exceed the available resources, your process will be restarted. You will receive a notification email, describing what happened.
- not possible to connect to hosts with a Socket other than port 80 (further, only incoming sockets allowed) to prevent spammers/hackers from abusing this service.
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For 5 EUR a month, I think it’s affordable for just about anyone aspiring to get into networked games (or other services).
What are your thoughts? Would you use this service?