Twenty Sided Minecraft Server: Lag City

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 7, 2011

Filed under: Notices 55 comments

Clint, the admin for our Twenty Sided Minecraft server, recently posted this to the forums:

So, bad news. I’m about at the point of giving up on our current host. I thought switching clusters might improve our rampant lag problems, but in testing today we’re having identical issues after switching. The new management of HazeNet seems singularly uninterested in helping, with a long email chain only resulting in a recommendation to switch over to their (much more expensive) Thrust::VPS servers. The issues appear to be because of overcrowding — when the server lags out, usually it’s only taking ~10% or less of the CPU, which points to problems sharing with the other VPS instances on the cluster.

What’s even worse is that I don’t have a good replacement host lined up. One of the main reasons I went with HazeNet in the first place was because they offered plans that were approximately a third as expensive as I could find anywhere else for equivalent server stats. This was all well and good when we first joined, as their servers were decently well managed. After they got bought out, we were moved to a different server cluster that was apparently much more crowded, and ended up being completely unsuitable for running a Minecraft server. What’s more, the only thing their support techs will do about it is recommend I switch to a plan by the company HazeNet got bought out by, which is three times as expensive as this one for nominally the same hardware.

Long story short, I’m looking for suggestions as to where to go from here. It’s apparent to me at this point that HazeNet is no longer a viable host. We’re currently paying $55 for every 3-month period, and we have a little less than a month left on our current contract. Most Minecraft-ready servers I’ve seen cost ~$50 per month, so we wouldn’t be able to switch to them without a significantly higher level of donations. Do people have any suggestions?

Clint

EDIT: Luckily, the forums are hosted on my DreamHost account, so we can keep those indefinitely, even if we lack a server capable of running Minecraft.

I thought the original deal sounded almost too good to be true. Still, if they say they’re giving you a VPS and you can’t even use 10% of the CPU, I’d say the fault lies with the overselling provider. This is hardly a new problem on the internet, but the perpetrators still deserve scorn for promising and not delivering.

So, the server has less than a month of life left, and it’s more or less unplayable right now due to lag.

Rather than go on a fund-raising drive, we’re wondering if anyone just has a box they can donate to the cause. Fifty bucks a month sounds difficult to sustain through donations, and I personally wouldn’t suggest giving these guys more money. They’ve proven they’re willing to under-deliver and then turn around and ask for more money. It’s entirely possible we could pay them and find ourselves in the same position a month or two down the road.

Suggestions?

 


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55 thoughts on “Twenty Sided Minecraft Server: Lag City

  1. Clint Olson says:

    Specifically, we’re hoping that we can find someone with a hosting company or fast connection who would be willing to let us use their bandwidth. The Minecraft server uses about 400GB of transfer per month, and needs roughly a 4 or 5 megabit upload speed to be lag-free. I’d be willing to personally put some cash towards building a suitably beefy server box to run the game on, but all of the colocation-type hosting services I’ve found cost ridiculous amounts of money (for a game server that’s essentially a hobby, at any rate).

    Clint

    1. Jattenalle says:

      Without making any binding promises, I can most likely provide a dedicated (Not VPS) server for Minecraft by May/June.

      1. Clint Olson says:

        Cool. If this ends up happening, could you PM me on the TwentyMine forums here when you’re ready? My username there is coandco.

        Clint

    2. Heron says:

      You could try a small Amazon EC2 instance; it’s only 1.7GB of RAM, but if you get a 1-year reservation you end up paying the equivalent of $40.86 per month. (You’d pay $62.05 per month without the reservation.) I’m not sure whether the CPU allocation is enough on that size, though. The high-cpu version of that instance costs exactly twice as much, which (I’m guessing) is out of your price range.

      I’d offer the use of my VPS, but it doesn’t have enough RAM :(

    3. Tuck says:

      INCONCEIVABLE!

      That’s the only possible reply to anything posted by anyone with that avatar.

      1. Fat Tony says:

        Hit Him With A Rock!

      2. Mari says:

        I don’t think that means what you think it means…

    4. dourhands says:

      hey clint,

      you can count me in on contrubuting to the cash flow. id be more then happy to kick in more then a few buck to keep the community up and going. feel free to email me and we can hammer out the details.

      Dourhands (hmmm i guess i didnt need to sing this since it has my name at the top)

  2. kikito says:

    I really haven’t done any game server stuff; is any web server ok for this kind of thing, or does it have to be “special” in some sort of way? What are the specs? (hd space, available memory, and the like)

    If any web server works, have you guys already tried 1and1 (1and1.com) ? Their prices are really slow, and claim to provide “unlimited” bandwith.

    1. HeroOfHyla says:

      A lot of web server places have “for web pages only” clauses in their TOS, preventing you from running game servers on them.

    2. Clint Olson says:

      The main problem is that the Minecraft server is an absolute pig for CPU and memory. It’ll happily use any amount of resources you throw at it, and any amount of memory less than 2GB or so will result in decreased performance once you hit 8-10 users. Also, it’s a constantly-running background process, which most shared-web services outright ban.

      I do have a DreamHost account, but I can’t host the game server itself there. Works great for hosting the forums, though.

    3. Alan De Smet says:

      Never trust a host offering “unlimited” anything. It just means they have a secret limit (somewhere around the point at which you become unprofitable) at which point they’ll declare that you’re “abusing” the system by using the unlimited bandwidth they’re promising and kick you off. I’ve seen too many people get burned by this.

      1. Heron says:

        Am I the only one that thinks your avatar looks a bit like Gordon Freeman?

        1. Fat Tony says:

          No, you’re not.

          P.S My Xbox avatar is designed to look like William “Bill” Overbeck
          (Of L4D Fame)

          1. Cuthalion says:

            Wait, I’ve heard that name before. But I never played L4D… the shuttle commander in Rocketman?

      2. Amarsir says:

        I was going to say the same thing: there’s no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. For most uses you’d never hit a reasonable bandwidth limit anyway, and the fact that they claim unmetered just means they’re not being honest with you about the real limits.

        The cheaper of the hosts I use is Crucial Paradigm, Which is indeed higher than those rates from haze. But it sounds to me like HazeNet was actually giving shared-level hosting not vps.

    4. Heron says:

      NO!

      I say this from bitter experience: 1&1 is the devil. (Link goes to my blog, where I elaborated this in detail.)

  3. Jabor says:

    It’s a little challenging to find a suitable host without knowing all the specs…

    [EDIT: Looking up Hazenet, I’m guessing you’re on the 2048 plan? 2GB of memory, a share of 2xXeon quads, 7Mbit unmetered connection?]

    Personally I’d stay away from anyone billing themselves as a “Minecraft host” – generally organizations branding themselves for niche markets (rather than as a general VPS host) are charging you significantly extra solely for the privilege of having the software you need already installed.

    1. Ian says:

      Personally I'd stay away from anyone billing themselves as a “Minecraft host” ““ generally organizations branding themselves for niche markets (rather than as a general VPS host) are charging you significantly extra solely for the privilege of having the software you need already installed.

      Yeah, but they’re also loaded with employees who know the ins and outs about getting the Minecraft server software to work well on their servers.

      Also, the requirements for game servers are a bit different than a general VPS. Minecraft, in particular, tends to hit the CPU hard when it generates terrain and, compared to most other online games, uses a truckload of bandwidth. People who lease Minecraft servers are aware of this and allocate enough CPU, RAM, and bandwidth to each box so that you don’t run into lag issues.

    2. Clint Olson says:

      Yes, we’re currently on the 2048 plan. You can see their list of plans here:

      http://hazenet.co.uk/vps.html

      Clint

  4. Scott Richmond says:

    Have you guys looked at the Dreamhost VPSs? At least talk to their staff – They’re usually happy to give you x days/weeks completely free to see what kind of VPS you need.

    1. Clint Olson says:

      Yeah, I have. Minecraft pretty much requires at least 2GB of RAM, an amount for which DreamHost charges $100/month. It’s a bit out of our price range.

      1. Bryan says:

        DH also has dedicated hardware again, as of approximately this month. I don’t remember from the last newsletter what the prices run, but that might work as well. Maybe you’ve already looked into this too though. :-/

  5. Kyte says:

    I know a guy that works hosting and would be willing to host a MC server (he’s already hosting his own, for one). He said he can go up to 1GB of RAM and easily take your current bandwidth usage (3.3TB bandwidth cap).

  6. Zak McKracken says:

    This is a bit OT, but the thought just occurred to me, so I had to write it down:
    Would it pe possible to make a game with a distributed server architecture? Meaning: The player computers carry some of the load of the server, and the more clients there are, the more bandwidth you get and so on. Sort of like a P2P game server. There’d have to be something where the game survives in case everyone logs off, but that machine would not need such a horribly big bandwidth.

    I’m not suggesting this could be done with Minecraft (let alone wihtin a month), but as a concept, it’d probably save a lot of nerves and money, because it could remove the need for a dedicated server, and Minecraft probably leaves quite an amount of processor time and memory unused on most client machines, so if that could be used for good …

    1. David F says:

      Yes, this could be done, but in addition to the technical problems of just getting it working, you’d also have to somehow protect against a potentially malicious client. With the current setup, the server has final say over everything, but with a p2p setup it’s possible for someone to write a program that pretends to be a normal peer, but actually cheats in some way. Getting around that problem without negating the benefits of a decentralized system is pretty difficult.

    2. Kyte says:

      Given the chunked nature of Minecraft, in theory, you could have each server handle a different set of player-populated chunks, in a sort of P2P way.

  7. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Not really a constructive post,but Ive just learned something interesting:My provider is friggin expensive.Monthly hosting is almost 150 euros for 200gb.Upside though is that individuals have it cheap,as I pay only about 20 euros for unlimited 5 mb/s link and cable television.And considering all the tv shows that Ive watched on the web,I went way over 200gb during one month.Man,internet billing is weird.

    1. Jabor says:

      Normally there are two different price structures for internet data:

      1. Slow-ish speeds, but no limit on bandwidth (e.g. 5Mbit unlimited data)
      2. Fast speeds, with a bandwidth cap (e.g. 100Mbit 1TB cap)

      Consumer connections tend towards the former (except in cases where they’re slow, and bandwidth-capped), primarily because they don’t really require that sort of speed. Whereas if you’re running a server, your bandwidth usage is likely to be very “bursty”, and so having a very fast connection is essential if you want your server to be responsive, but most of the time you won’t be using it all.

    2. Strangeite says:

      I know I am getting very close to the “No Politics” edict sent from on high, but…

      This is a very good example of how over the last 65 years US policy has favored corporations over individuals and European policies tend to favor individuals over corporations.

      On a more practical topic, you should find a cheaper host. Even with the exchange rate, you will save a bundle.

      1. Clint Olson says:

        Heh. As much as I’d like to agree with you, both HazeNet and Thrust::VPS (the company that bought them out) are UK companies. US laws have nothing to do with it.

        1. Strangeite says:

          I was replying to Daemian Lucifer’s comparison of his hosting plan costing significantly more than his home ISP cost.

          For me here in the States, it is the exact opposite. I have a 10mbs connection (which is pretty good for the US) and pay 10x more per month for the connection than I do for my hosting account.

          Granted my experience is a sample size of 1, but when I wrote the above comment, I was very tired and still not emotionally repaired over my teams exit from the NCAA tournament.

      2. Zak McKracken says:

        I think that depends strongly on which part of the market or daily live you look at.
        US legislation looks weird from a European standpoint sometimes, but then there are also those huge “regular people vs. big evil Corp.” lawsuits, and they are being won, and there seems to be a lot of respect for that kind of thing, too. In Europe, laws are different, but also people are expected to know themselves that hot coffee might be hot (and it is actually served hotter here!). Maybe the battle of “folks vs. companies” is waging higher in the US? This would always produce more extremes, so it’s easier to find examples of corporate dominance, but regarding the average frontlines, I’m not actually sure whether there’s a principal difference. Providers and hosters will try to screw you here, too. They did try with me.
        And also, it’s far from homogeneous within Europe.

        1. Bai Shen says:

          Please read the facts about the hot coffee case. It’s not so simple as you think.

          http://www.caoc.com/CA/index.cfm?event=showPage&pg=facts

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            I prefer the one about the guy who had his prized ensured cigarettes disappear in a series of localized fires.

  8. Hey Shamus, I remembered that you mentioned the game Second Sight in the roundtable talk on the Escapist.
    I assume you like the music as well?
    http://www.graemenorgate.com/

    That’s the guy who made the music. He’s also the one that did the music for Timesplitters, and apparently worked on Crysis 2 as well as many other familiar games.

    The full Second Sight soundtrack is available for download. (just scroll some ways down that page).

    Have fun!

  9. Jethro says:

    I’ve sent an email to my hosting provider to find out what they can offer me through my plan. As a reseller, I have a pretty good amount of bandwidth available, but I had to ask about CPU and RAM allocations on my servers. I’ll update when I have a reply.

  10. Airsoftslayer93 says:

    Mmmm i really have no knowledge of servers and the like, but i will be able to donate a little to the server maybe next week, might post more on the forums

  11. Rune says:

    I have fiber to house and sit on a 30/30 connection i almost dont use. I however dont have the monetary means to supply a server as well but i would be willing to let it run at my place 24/7 for no charge. If necessary i will upgrade to 60/60.

    just one little thing. I live in Denmark so i dont know if the increased latency will be a problem.

    Email me if you are interested.

    1. Clint Olson says:

      One problem: I don’t have your email address. Could you send me a PM on the TwentyMine forums here to get in contact with me? My username on the forums is “coandco”.

      Clint

  12. Chainsaw says:

    How about Servercraft
    I don’t know how many slots you need so I can’t say if its to expensive.

    1. Peter Olson says:

      We looked at that one. We have a cap of 20 people on the minecraft server, rendering that one basically the same price as the rest.

  13. TehShrike says:

    I have a box if you need it. Hit me up on gtalk/twitter

  14. Steve C says:

    This sounds like a common problem. What have other people done to solve it?

  15. Amarsir says:

    A quick check on webhostingtalk only leaves me surprised you stuck it out this long. :/

  16. Mari says:

    I have no solutions but whatever you guys figure out, I’ll happily chip in towards it if you’ll let me plus two kiddos play there. I’m sick of trying to run a family Minecraft server from my box. I don’t have a spare computer sitting around and as you’ve mentioned, Minecraft is a resource hog.

  17. Nathon says:

    Late entry, but I use RapidXen for my web site and they don’t oversubscribe their VPSs. They’re also super-inexpensive. They don’t care what you run, as long as it’s legal, and they don’t have transfer caps (they’ll throttle to 2 Mb/s if you use too much, at least on my cheapest-possible plan)

    For $45/month, you get 2 Xeon cores and 512 MB of RAM. You can also add cores and RAM per this.

    The top of that page has their pricing options, by the way. If you don’t need 40 GB of hard drive space, you can drop the cost (and CPU count) by going to 20. Anyway, you can read the tables.

    1. Heron says:

      $45/month for a VPS with 512MB RAM is hardly “super-inexpensive” :P

      Linode will give you that same VPS (essentially) for $20/month; they don’t oversubscribe, and I haven’t had a single performance or reliability issue with my two Linode VPSes. They give you access to all the (virtual) processors on the host, only throttling your speed if the other VPSes on the host are active as well. Since most of these boxes are web servers or other similar non-CPU-intensive servers, you’ve got mostly complete access to four cores most of the time.

      There is a bandwidth cap, but it’s a reasonable 200GB/month for the 512MB VPS, and if you have more than one VPS you share the combined bandwidth cap between them.

      1. The Gecko says:

        This has been my experience as well, albeit I use mine mostly for more mundane tasks such as VPN hosting, email, etc.

      2. Nathon says:

        I didn’t mention the 40 GB of storage from RapidXen, which is actually one of the more expensive bits in a VPS cluster. I actually use their lowest-tier offering, which is about $7/month with no bandwidth cap and 5 GB of storage. It makes a terrific web server, even with the hangman solver which uses a good chunk of CPU and actually gets hit pretty hard.

        That said, I guess this stuff won’t suffice for the issue at hand. They need more better bandwidth and free is hard to beat.

  18. Cezar says:

    Did you guys try http://www.serverffs.com? We had a server from them and it worked pretty decently. That from my personal experience (it was a Dedicated and we also had a VPS for a few months)

  19. Shawn Hawk says:

    Hey guys. I am testing MC servers on my boxes. I have these 2 setup for testing but I am getting a bigger dedicated server very soon. This server is a Quad Core with 16GB of ram and unmetered bandwidth. If you try them and like them I will start to host them. If not then I more than likely will only do private servers. I will also post an update when the bigger specs arrive.

    69.64.33.206:25565
    69.64.33.206:25566

  20. Volatar says:

    Another site that a go to that hosts a Minecraft server also got screwed by the HazeNet buyout. They switched to a different provider but just last week ended up taking the server down because they just couldn’t afford it.

  21. Mistwraithe says:

    This is totally not the right place to post BUT someone might know. I can’t buy Minecraft!

    Actually, that isn’t necessarily completely true. I could perhaps buy Minecraft if I was willing to pay via MoneyBooker. You see on the prepurchase.jsp page there aren’t any radio buttons for selecting payment method, just some words (Visa, Mastercard, etc), two of which (Moneybookers and Paypal) have badly positioned images (overlapping the words).

    All of the payment method names display a hand cursor if you your mouse move over them like you could *perhaps* click on them in some alternative universe. However clicking on them in all 5 browsers on the 3 computers I have tried does nothing. So after trying vainly to click on Visa or Paypal for a while I try clicking Proceed to Checkout.

    Sure enough, every single time it redirects me to MoneyBookers to complete my purchase. I’ve never even HEARD of MoneyBookers before and I’m certainly not creating an account on it just to buy Minecraft!

    So naturally I will just contact Minecraft support and ask what to do about it…. LOLZZZZ. As if they have a support email or anything of the like.

    Sigh. If someone has the answer then please let me know. Currently I believe they have stuffed up their prepurchase page, though no one else is complaining on Google (but surely 3 computers and 5 browsers can’t be wrong?). Maybe one day they will realise it, though probably not from anyone like emailing them and letting them know, because they don’t seem to have an email address!

  22. Jason says:

    Check out Admix Hosting, they offer 1GB of memory for $10p/m and for $25 pm they can do 3or 4 GB of RAM. The servers came with a Xeon processor and a 100Mb/s up / down connection.

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