we have a few serveone of them is pretty high spec, we want to use it as a game server and a potenti

mattyjim123 · 6 May 2014 at 21:56

The loft could work, but it depends on how the loft is constructed and insulated.

Condensation may build up a little (although it shouldn't, because of ventilation) and there still may be rapid changes in temperature.

BattFink · 6 May 2014 at 22:43

I generally find loft's to be the worst place to stick a computer (from an environmental aspect), it gets the worst of both worlds.. e.g. too hot or so cold that condensation becomes an issue

Personally I wouldn't host a server at home if I were planning to rent it out for monetary gain... been there done that.. (soon moved the box to a datacentre - life was much better)

Most of the people I dealt with would be expecting a very low latency connection, 99.9% uptime etc..

How do you plan to support it if a "server" fails or your internet connection fails?

mattyjim123 · 6 May 2014 at 22:52

To be honest its most likely that we don't look to using the servers for monetary gain, but more just to host various game servers where donations could make it a non profit operation essentially. That way, should the server go down due to technical fault, or for any other reason for that matter, we'll try and get it back up again of course, but the only thing people will be able to really complain about is losing their multiplayer save etc.

Much less pressure and responsibility than actually offering internet services where people people intend to rent something rather than just donate.

DJMK4 · 6 May 2014 at 23:44

BattFink said:
Personally I wouldn't host a server at home if I were planning to rent it out for monetary gain... been there done that.. (soon moved the box to a datacentre - life was much better)

Most of the people I dealt with would be expecting a very low latency connection, 99.9% uptime etc..

How do you plan to support it if a "server" fails or your internet connection fails?

Not sure what his intentions are but he kind of said web hosting, then said wouldn't be run 24x7.

If you were looking at renting out VMs to businesses then yeah that's a whole different ball game, low latency, high bandwidth, uptime and availability, backups, ups for uninterrupted power, hardware failures ?

Then you need to think about costs.

Rroff · 6 May 2014 at 23:57

mattyjim123 said:
To be honest its most likely that we don't look to using the servers for monetary gain, but more just to host various game servers where donations could make it a non profit operation essentially. That way, should the server go down due to technical fault, or for any other reason for that matter, we'll try and get it back up again of course, but the only thing people will be able to really complain about is losing their multiplayer save etc.

Much less pressure and responsibility than actually offering internet services where people people intend to rent something rather than just donate.

Depending on the scale your aiming for (I was hosting over 2 dozen servers for games like trackmania, l4d, cs, etc.) I never found donations in short supply when I did it for a bit - didn't even ask or encourage donations as I did it for my own experience/enjoyment.

However does take a lot of effort to get servers populated and a community going around it not to mention maintaining the servers - I ended up creating a load of usermin control panels for myself to make life a bit easier: http://aten-hosted.com/images/mcadmin.jpg etc.

AWalnut · 7 May 2014 at 14:40

Rroff said:
Depending on the scale your aiming for (I was hosting over 2 dozen servers for games like trackmania, l4d, cs, etc.) I never found donations in short supply when I did it for a bit - didn't even ask or encourage donations as I did it for my own experience/enjoyment.

However does take a lot of effort to get servers populated and a community going around it not to mention maintaining the servers - I ended up creating a load of usermin control panels for myself to make life a bit easier: http://aten-hosted.com/images/mcadmin.jpg etc.

Would that be something we'd have to create for ourself? Because we have come to a conclusion that we are going to host a public minecraft server with multiple worlds, running the server through a Virtual machine, limiting the resources to, say, 2 cores and 8gb ram, to put a 'cap' on the power draw - thinking about running costs, we are not going to start a hosting service as the data protection/backup etc is just not possible from my home broadband.