anyone try cloud server hosting?

[Sporto]

i'm looking at amazon's hosting (http://aws.amazon.com/game-hosting/) and wondering if anyone has tried it yet.

google sez a dude who plays hldm likes it but i'm thinking more orange box for something friday/saturday nights (not a 24/7 server).

trying to calculate game requirements vs their pricing for server scaling

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holy crap, nm. added up it would be like $1000 for linux hosting of l4d2 for 1 lan party game night

[iainlbc]

I've actually run several valve based servers on cloud technology.

It is indeed great to not pay monthly charges when you use a server for maybe 10-20 hours total a month.

I prefer rackspace over amazon. Amazon's technology is very old. My testing shows the CPU's are 8-10x slower, literally. Amazon is also more expensive. I am running a "on-demand" left4dead2 server (great because you only need it when you/your buddies play) on rackspace. I wrote a tutorial on setting up the dedicated server on centos, here:

http://www.iainlbc.com/2011/10/tutorial-how-to-setup-a-dedicated-left4dead2-server-on-centos-5-6/

The next tutorial I'll outline how to setup the server so you can turn it off/on as needed with minimal effort.

Cheers,

IW

[Mike]

How do they run? I've got one from UK2, haven't tested it yet tho. May do so tonight after seeing this thread tho :p

[Nisd]

I think games like Left 4 Dead and such must be ideal, as you do not have the high cpu, memory requirements.

But I am doubt full about running a full CSS Server.

[Mike]

Hah, didn't work! Got it full, fps = ~10. Seemed to work pretty good at the start, the fps didn't fluctuate but now it does. I also tried running a orange_x3 server on it, same drop in fps, just now ~5 fps. I haven't got L4D so i can't test it. Just saying, the game is playable with 10 - 15 players, but after that it goes unplayable.

[Nisd]

If you should do "cloud hosting" I think you will need a custom made cloud.

[Mike]

Or just a 42GHz one. (talking in blocks here)

[Nisd]

Not really, cause you need the 42GHz on a single core, not over like 40 cores.

[Mike]

Oh lol, forgot single-threaded heh.

[Nisd]

Well SRCDS wont fit into a standart cloud host.

Tho game server providers could learn something from the cloud, the ability to migrate server, live and without the customer noticing.
You could really optimize the amount of servers you would need to have.

I got a couple of ideas, but don't have the time or money.

[loopyman]

(10-11-2011, 05:37 AM)Nisd Wrote:  Well SRCDS wont fit into a standart cloud host.

Tho game server providers could learn something from the cloud, the ability to migrate server, live and without the customer noticing.
You could really optimize the amount of servers you would need to have.

I got a couple of ideas, but don't have the time or money.

I believe a couple of the big named providers used clouds. I'm not sure if they still do, but it's a great idea if applied properly.

(10-11-2011, 02:51 AM)Mike Wrote:  Oh lol, forgot single-threaded heh.

TF2 and Garrysmod are multi-threaded... At least they tend to use multiple cores on our machines.

[MrEd]

(10-11-2011, 05:37 AM)Nisd Wrote:  Well SRCDS wont fit into a standart cloud host.

Tho game server providers could learn something from the cloud, the ability to migrate server, live and without the customer noticing.
You could really optimize the amount of servers you would need to have.

I got a couple of ideas, but don't have the time or money.

At his point and time cloud platforms for game server hosting don't really make sense. The majority of the cloud platforms out there use SAN storage. When you have games like minecraft that are very I/O intensive it makes more sense to be able to load SSDs on a server and get better performance than to run everything via ISCSI or fiber-channel. Local storage will ALWAYS be faster than anything over the network.

If providers did go this route they would not make much money. Redundant cloud platforms are expensive to build. GSPs just cant bring int that kind of revenue unless you are one of the big dogs like NFO or Gameservers.

My 2 cents
Ed

[Exodus_Ben]

(10-11-2011, 09:13 AM)loopyman Wrote:  

(10-11-2011, 05:37 AM)Nisd Wrote:  Well SRCDS wont fit into a standart cloud host.

Tho game server providers could learn something from the cloud, the ability to migrate server, live and without the customer noticing.
You could really optimize the amount of servers you would need to have.

I got a couple of ideas, but don't have the time or money.

I believe a couple of the big named providers used clouds. I'm not sure if they still do, but it's a great idea if applied properly.

(10-11-2011, 02:51 AM)Mike Wrote:  Oh lol, forgot single-threaded heh.

TF2 and Garrysmod are multi-threaded... At least they tend to use multiple cores on our machines.

Isn't it TCAdmin or Windows Server that does the thread-distribution?

[Drocona]

SRCDS can jump between cores to load balance, it never uses more than 1 core at the same time though.

[realchamp]

(04-13-2012, 07:44 AM)Drocona Wrote:  SRCDS can jump between cores to load balance, it never uses more than 1 core at the same time though.

It's multi threaded now. But the logical calculations still only utilize one thread. It makes threads for network data and a logical calculations. Although performance on a smaller server is unnoticeable and incredible small on larger servers. It depends on the core speed, if you've a very popular server on a slow dual core the network handling would be a lot better with two threads(one on each core). In other words if your CPU is not 100% loaded it shouldn't make any difference. But cloud hosting for SRCDS would not bring any performance benefit, since what mattes is not multi threaded, yet.

But as Drocona said SRCDS can jump between cores to improve its performance if said core is working on another program.