HELP - one player's base is killing my bandwidth

[VideoBoy]

There's a player in my server that eats up between 1 and 2 megabits per second every time he's around his base. He plays with a friend on the same LAN and their collective bandwidth usage goes up to 4.10Mbps (according to iftop). This isn't a problem as far as band WIDTH because nobody else uses that much and my server still never reaches half my full bandwidth, but now that Comcast implemented data caps, I can't afford to spend 20GB per day on Minecraft, which was the case yesterday according to my DD-WRT logs.

I monitored the usage throughout the day and it was always the same IP eating the most bandwidth. I asked both players to tp to spawn at one point and it lowered to 300-500Kbps so I'm pretty sure it's something around their base. I don't want to have to ask them to move away because of this but I have to solve this problem ASAP. I've seen their base personally and it is pretty complex but I can't kick people out every time they get to that level of technological advancement which pretty much is the point of Tekkit. What do you guys recommend I do?

Thanks in advance!

PS: before anyone suggests it, no, I cannot afford off-site hosting. I host servers at home because it's free. I'm an unemployed college student and I'm not going to get a job to pay for Minecraft.

[Neowulf]

Unfortunately off-site hosting is your only real option, if this keeps up you won't be able to run a server because comcast will cut you off completely.

Their base is affecting you in the real world, so it has become a problem. Either nuke it from orbit, tell them to tone it down, or get some donations to rent a server.

Frankly that is an insane amount of bandwidth. I can't imagine the amount of stuff they would have to have to generate that many updates per second.

[VideoBoy]

Unfortunately off-site hosting is your only real option, if this keeps up you won't be able to run a server because comcast will cut you off completely.

Their base is affecting you in the real world, so it has become a problem. Either nuke it from orbit, tell them to tone it down, or get some donations to rent a server.

Frankly that is an insane amount of bandwidth. I can't imagine the amount of stuff they would have to have to generate that many updates per second.

I've already spent hundreds of donation dollars to build a badass computer for the server so renting a server seems like a waste. I hear people do something called "colocating" where they take their server to a data center and let them host it, and you only pay for the bandwidth. How accessible are these? I can't seem to find the right keywords to google them. I found this one data center and called them but the lady said it would cost over a thousand dollars per month. I'm like, kthxbai. Then I called another one (in my area) and they agreed to call me back but never did. Where do you guys get these datacenters? I doubt anyone in their right mind would pay >$1k for a Minecraft server... Anything that requires calling first to ask for a quote is assumed to be ridiculously expensive.

[Octo]

what you say it's called "housing" over here, and it's much more expensive than having a specific minecraft-tekkit hosting.

I mean, that solution is meant for housing big servers, then companys get their costs reduced compared to the price of a big server hosting, but, as far as i know and based on the info you give us, it's not a solution for you in any way.

If you do a good search you'll find many good hosting plans at very reduced cost.

If you still want info on housing plans look for your nearest datacenter and ask for prices.

[Neowulf]

That $1000/month buys you space in a data center, which is much better for businesses than having the server sit on a folding table in a wiring closet.

They usually have a very fat pipe to work with if not direct truck access, large bank UPS with power conditioning, climate control you could only dream of in your house, industrial fire suppressant, 24hr on (site/call) tech for hands on work, background checked personnel, and electronic security for physical access.

Pretty damn overkill for a tekkit server.

$5 a month with a minecraft host buys you enough allocated processing power in a virtual machine to run a small server and never have to worry about bandwidth, hardware, power, or server updates.

[The_DarthMoogle]

snip

I'm inclined to agree with Neowulf here - I almost killed myself laughing as you suggested that...

There's billions of awesome hosting companies out there, and I hear on the vine that some specialise in Tekkit for no fathomable reason.

Ask around your playerbase if things get a little daunting.

[VideoBoy]

I had a VPS for a month or so a long time ago, on a Bukkit server. I would get regular freezes during what I presume were peak hours. Like 5 to 30 seconds of pure CPU freeze. At 10 seconds or longer, when the server came back on everyone would get disconnected. VPS's are shit and I would never get the same level of performance than I do with a dedicated computer with a quadcore processor (inb4 bukkit is singlecore) and 8 gigs of ram. If housing isn't an option at all then all I'm left with is renting a dedicated computer which costs no less than $40 a month.

I'm just gonna beg for donations to cover the extra bandwidth. Thanks guys. :)

[CoderJ]

I had a VPS for a month or so a long time ago, on a Bukkit server. I would get regular freezes during what I presume were peak hours. Like 5 to 30 seconds of pure CPU freeze. At 10 seconds or longer, when the server came back on everyone would get disconnected. VPS's are shit and I would never get the same level of performance than I do with a dedicated computer with a quadcore processor (inb4 bukkit is singlecore) and 8 gigs of ram. If housing isn't an option at all then all I'm left with is renting a dedicated computer which costs no less than $40 a month.

I'm just gonna beg for donations to cover the extra bandwidth. Thanks guys.

No, you had a bad VPS host and instead of doing research or assuming you could have made a bad choice, you feign that all hosts must be bad unless they give you a whole dedicated machine (which, for a decent price is not gonna happen).

That's like saying I had a car for a month and every other day it would belch smoke and kill a baby. All cars are shit.

Much like cars and software and many other things, there are many different companies that offer hosting/VPS services out there. Some are overselling money-grubbing weasels whose ineptitude will result in overloaded servers and thus the situation you describe (freezes, lag, crashes) while others carefully manage their hardware and sales so performance is never an issue.

Talk to other server ops/admin to find out who they use and if they like them or not, and for the love of god, get a little more education on hosting types/terminology.

[Brentnauer]

NFOservers. Use them.

[VideoBoy]

No, you had a bad VPS host and instead of doing research or assuming you could have made a bad choice, you feign that all hosts must be bad unless they give you a whole dedicated machine (which, for a decent price is not gonna happen).

That's like saying I had a car for a month and every other day it would belch smoke and kill a baby. All cars are shit.

Much like cars and software and many other things, there are many different companies that offer hosting/VPS services out there. Some are overselling money-grubbing weasels whose ineptitude will result in overloaded servers and thus the situation you describe (freezes, lag, crashes) while others carefully manage their hardware and sales so performance is never an issue.

Talk to other server ops/admin to find out who they use and if they like them or not, and for the love of god, get a little more education on hosting types/terminology.

NFOservers. Use them.

$80 for the quadcore VPS. LOL. No wonder the one I had before sucked... that was $10 a month.

Frankly I'm not planning to pay anything. Maybe $20 of exceeded bandwidth per month until I run out of donation money. At the rate I'm going this month I'll end up paying more than $50 by the end of the month, but I've already taken drastic measures to slow it down.

[Brentnauer]

So start with the 59.99 plan. If that's all it's running, you can host plenty of people. I had 20 to 30 online at a time running vanilla - that was before version 1 when performance enhancements were made.

If saving the extra couple of bucks is really worth the time spent policing your server to that degree, by all means keep running it from your house.

[CoderJ]

What's the obsession with quadcore? Almost any good minecraft host (read: any host people rave about and are willing to throw more money at) is usually only going to give you one virtual core, 2 if you're running other intensive processes on the VPS. If a host is using a decent CPU (most are using multicore Xeon or better... not the cheap stuff, we're talking processors that cost more than most people pay for a mid-range gaming PC), that single core can easily outperform most 'dedicated' machines (provided they haven't oversold).

(I wrote a longer post, but I've realize there's no point... at this point you're just digging in your heels due to either lack of understanding or guilt over having spend donor money on a server that is going to now cost extra to run... for the cost of a medium sized minecraft hosting plan, at that.)

I feel bad about the situation you're in and all I can do for you now is advocate doing research in the future. Building a $800 dedicated minecraft hosting machine is kind of silly when it's about the same as a $40/mo hosting plan (and the host, if they're good, will most probably upgrade their hardware a few times in that period). (Not saying you spent $800, not sure what you did and frankly don't care... whatever it was is technically too much.)

[greedseed]

well there are caching clients out there.

I still wonder why tekkit is not yet implementing one

[VideoBoy]

What's the obsession with quadcore? Almost any good minecraft host (read: any host people rave about and are willing to throw more money at) is usually only going to give you one virtual core, 2 if you're running other intensive processes on the VPS. If a host is using a decent CPU (most are using multicore Xeon or better... not the cheap stuff, we're talking processors that cost more than most people pay for a mid-range gaming PC), that single core can easily outperform most 'dedicated' machines (provided they haven't oversold).

(I wrote a longer post, but I've realize there's no point... at this point you're just digging in your heels due to either lack of understanding or guilt over having spend donor money on a server that is going to now cost extra to run... for the cost of a medium sized minecraft hosting plan, at that.)

I feel bad about the situation you're in and all I can do for you now is advocate doing research in the future. Building a $800 dedicated minecraft hosting machine is kind of silly when it's about the same as a $40/mo hosting plan (and the host, if they're good, will most probably upgrade their hardware a few times in that period). (Not saying you spent $800, not sure what you did and frankly don't care... whatever it was is technically too much.)

Bro, quit making up conclusions to judge me with. At the time there was nothing to do with donation money but upgrade to better hardware so that's what I did. It wasn't until recently that the fuckwits over at Comcast got butthurt over people using Netflix rather than their shitty Xfinity so they put up bandwidth caps, and that's when the problem started. Had I known about this dick move in advance, I would've stuck with the computer I had initially and I would have $700 to spend on bandwidth right now. But how would I had known? I know this machine is overkill for Minecraft. That's why I run 2 servers on it. But there was nothing better to spend the money on. Except candy and hookers of course, but I wouldn't betray my players like that.

[Milk]

You know, money doesn't disappear if you don't spend it fast enough (unlike TF2). You could have, y'know, made a rainy day fund or something. But apparently, you didn't, and now it's a rainy day.

[DoctorSLO]

The solution I've used for myself:

- go on http://www.hetzner.de/

- change to english language

- go on server bidding

- buy yourself a server you like

- at the same day you'll receive a server

- you will pay 3-5 days after you've received it