Very Important

FYI, you have to register to vote.

There HAS to be some other decent alternative to Turkey.

"{DOU}.:cHiCkEn/ wrote: FYI, you have to register to vote.

There HAS to be some other decent alternative to Turkey.

Later tonight I am gonna start a discussion about alternatives. Unlike him we don't want to rush into anything blindly, but we should start discussing alternatives.

T

P.S. The brand new version of FireFox has a spell checker built into it, pretty nice.

I'm not sure what Turkey is charging us, but I found this company that seems competitive. The guy that runs it was quoted in a Microsoft article on renting game servers, that's how I found it.

http://www.serverxtreme.com/games.php

Edit: Ok, so Turkey is $1.00 a slot, those guys are $2.00 a slot. You get what you pay for. lol

Turkey has had problems in the past with us and we all know that, but his servers really are way beyond decent. If he'll go a dollar a slot, I'm going to change the UT2k4 server I have with gameservers.net over to Turkey. It would cut costs a little. Have a good one.

-Johnny Jones

"{DOU}.:cHiCkEn/ wrote: Edit: Ok, so Turkey is $1.00 a slot, those guys are $2.00 a slot. You get what you pay for. lol

Well, it might even be better then Turkey (howe could it not, lol), but we wouldn't really save any money switching, and the workload is too great just to get rid of turkey. If that was the only other option then maybe at some point in the future, but the thought of having to move 3 game servers yet again just makes my skin crawl.

The other option is to get our own server.

Before I get into that let me define a few things here.

#1 - Server - a physical box residing at a data center. You install games and other applications on it. Being at a data center it is usually connected to a fat pipe (fast connection right to an internet backbone). If you have a problem with the server it is usually your responsibility to fix it (other then hardware failures which are the responsibility of the person renting the server to you. If you purchase / rent one of these, you are getting a "dedicated server"

#2 - Game Server - This is not a server at all, it is a process running on a server. As far as the game goes, there is a server and a client, but it is confusing as most people thing they actually have a full computer running the game. This is not the case and most GSP's (Game Service Providers) have servers loaded as much as possible with games. Some make their money in volume sales, like turkey, others offer more expensive prices, but you get a greater piece of the servers resources.

O.K., wasn't gonna make this a big post, but I guess I will commit and get this all out there and people can see where we are and where we could go.

First, let me explain how Turkey does his business. He never told me but I gained enough info to figure it out. He rents dedicated servers from a company that owns then at a data center. I figure they cost him between 369 - 399 each. He then has software installed (he hires someone else to set his servers up for him) and in turn rents out "space" on the servers known as "game servers." When last I knew, he was installing 16 customer games on a box. So assuming he is paying the low end of 369, it works out that he is getting 35 x 16 - 369 a month for each box. That leaves him with a profit of 191 a month per 16 customers. Obviously he must also pay income tax on his profits. Therefore he must be a volume reseller. His profit margin doesn't play into this too much (a little bit I will get into later) but I am explaining it all here so everybody will understand everything.

The reason for explaining the money is this - if he starts selling 1 dollar a slot servers great for us...or is it? The price will be great as we would pay less then half of what we are paying now (assuming we took say 16 slot servers which I think would be plenty). But, and this is a big but, Turkey still has to pay for the servers and make a profit. So if he is making less money off us us he has to make it up somewhere else. The obvious way to do this is to add even more games to a box. This presents 3 problems, processor load, ram usage, and bandwidth usage. Obviously if more games are running then there is a greater processor load. That alone might not be too big a concern. If he loaded the machines too much then during peak hours we might take a hit. I don't know. However, thats just the first factor in what might give us a hit. There is also ram. Each process running on the box takes a chunk of ram, known as a memory partition. The more processes (games) running, the smaller the chunk of ram we get for our game. last, the more games running, the more people connected to the box, the more bandwidth requirements there are, the greater potential for lag. Actually, all 3 could create a situation for increased lag, and the lesser memory could also create stability issues. If the game runs out of ram it will crash.

So, what we are looking at is Turkey possibly really fucking things up if he isn't careful and making all the games run like shit. Our voting is a moot point - if we stay with what we have now he would still stick the 1 dollar per slot servers on our box with us. So our best course of action is to go the cheapest route, the quality of the server will be the same regardless of how much we pay. Of course there is a chance he will be O.K., but we do need to be aware of this. Turkey (Paul) has a very long history of making rash decisions without thinking things through and then regretting it and causing his customers to suffer for it...i.e. all the i.p. changes because of all the "great" ideas he had and then had to reverse. So, this is a wait and see thing, but if he offers the 1 dollar a slot servers we will switch to that in the short term.

Now, what are our other options? We could switch to another GSP or get a dedicated server of our own.

As for other GSP's, we did in the past look and really couldn't find anything comparable in price. The 2 dollar a slot option mentioned by Chicken above would mean reducting our slots to 16 and then paying the same price that we do now. And we don't know what type of disk space we would be allowed. 99% of all GSP's allow enough space for only about 50-60 maps. It would also mean an I.P. change again. And of course as I mentioned above, also a lot of work... a lot or work.

Before I go further let me state that doing anything other then sticking with Turkey will result in a lot of work. I understand that and am willing to do the work if it is justifiable. Switching to another business just because it is not Turkey is not what I would consider justifiable. It would be were it not for the work involved.

Last, we could rent our own dedicated server. There are a lot of pro's and a lot of con's to such a thing.

First, the pro's. It would be our own server. With respect to the hardware limitations and bandwidth limitations, we could do anything at all that we wanted to do with the server. It is ours. We would be cutting out a middleman here. We would have even greater disk space then we have now. At the very least (with an entry level box) we would get an 80 gig drive). Remember, it's not a home computer, so other then the OS, all the space is for games. So there would be plenty to spare. We would only use the space for game stuff however as we don't want to eat up the limited bandwidth for non-gaming stuff (it would suck to have the server stop sending data with a week left in the pay-period because we went over quote). Another pro is that we could then tell Turkey to kiss our black asses. Also, not being limited to a lame control panel means that there is a whole lot more we could do with the server if we wanted or needed to. Also, we have a choice between linux and Windows Server 2003 for our OS (have to choose 1, not use either).

There are other pro's I am not thinking of, as well as other con's that I am not going to think about for below, but I think the pro's mentioned above are very nice. Eliminating the GSP is a very attractive idea.

Now for the con's, and there are several of them. First, you pay by the server, not the game. Thus if funds were low, we could not get rid of one game to lighten the load, it's all or nothing. I will get more into this when I explain the pricing. Next, there is little to no support for a dedicated server. This means there is no control panel to turn games on and off and stuff like that. This means I would have to severly limit who had access to the box. It's not just a matter or screwing up a game but the whole box. One bad command and the OS is fucked up and we are out of commission for 3 weeks while I have to re-install the OS and then the games and then all the files. Also, along that line, there is a learning curve to this. Fortunately i have several friend who have dedicated servers that are willing to help me.

In my next post I will explain some of the dedicated server options (this post is getting too long).

T

O.K., I needed a break from typing so I went to play for a bit which turned into an all-nighter, lol.

I will post the last part later today.

However, 2 things have happened since that post that I need to make everybody aware of.

First, I *************. Actually I can't yet say what this is but it is big. I need to discuss this with someone and see what we want to do. But it is very important to the entire clan and I will be posting about it within the next day or two.

Second, Turkey went ahead and decided that he is going to do his price cut thing. Just as I said above, he was too rash and after just a few hours of thinking about this he decided to do it. Not very smart for a business to jump so quickly without taking the time to consider what he is doing. Another thing I thought about and I bet he didn't is the fact that he is going to experience an immediate reduction in incoming revenue. Sure he might get more business to pick up the slack, but not immediately. First off everybody will be converting their servers to less slots for less money. I don't think he fully realizes the financial crunch he is about to be in. Had he not burned his bridges with the resident financial guru, I would have made him aware of this. Of course I didn't think of it right away...why you don't rush decisions like this.

Even if we do the first thing above (the thing nobody knows what the hell I am talking about), it will take some time to do. Hopefully not too long, but we will not rush such an important change. So in the mean time I am going to cut all of our servers to 16 slot servers unless anyone has a strong objection to my doing so. It will be an immediate 57 dollar a month savings.

More on everything later today.

Tommy

Well i cant say i have ever seen 16 players in at once so that shouldn't be a problem at all....

and i wont comment on the 'first' thing lol