Thinking of renting a linux server to host

[Arkham]

How much ram should i get? And do ppl have a good virtual hosting company?

I'll probably use RHEL 5 or RHEL 6 somewhere.

[Arkham]

anyone have any idea about this? I'd spring for the cost of renting a server as long as its reasonable, but if its something like 40 bucks a month due to memory requirements i'd pass.

[thecodemonk]

I'm no Minecraft server master... However, it should probably be a couple gig at least. If you are ONLY going to do minecraft, you may want to stay away from the larger linux distros. While they use far less memory than windows, there are still things running that you probably won't ever need.

Since I have 16 gigs of ram at home, I set up Virtual Box from Oracle (it's free), downloaded the latest version of MineOS and set it up and run a server off my machine at home. I started out with just 2 gigs of ram and it seemed to decent for the 3 players we had connected to it. In my reading, it seems that having 1 gig of ram is a bare minimum just for the Minecraft server. So if you leave some headroom for the OS and then let the MineOS create a decent ram disk for the world data, you would probably need to have at least 2 gig. Since mine was a virtual machine and I had the foresight to install the x64 edition first, all I had to do was turn it off and allocate 4 gigs of ram to it and turn it back on. I use that to host 2 worlds now. I also have the host machine running a McMyAdmin instance for a server. That will soon go away once Tekkit is out. I will put a Tekkit world up using MineOS as it seems pretty stable.

I haven't looked, but you might be able to find some companies doing only Minecraft hosting.

[Arkham]

2GB at least for server? ok. I'd probably do 4 GB. But that gets wicked expensive.

I'd turn off all services I would not need, i can figure out what i need or not easily enough. :)

[thecodemonk]

This really isn't something like a mail server or something. You're hosting Minecraft.. It can be pretty resource intensive.

It's probably cheaper to find just a place that does minecraft hosting. Then you are not worried about the resources for the server, just for the game... Like these:

http://redstonehost.com/

http://www.minecraftserverhost.net/minecraft_plans.html

http://treepuncher.com/

[Wolvenmoon]

When I'm hosting Tekkit for two players on my Windows desktop (Intel C2Q9450 w/ 8 gigs of RAM), I'm allocating 4 gigs of RAM to it. I've had RAM crashes at 2 and 3 gigs on Technic (pre-tekkit days). Tekkit is probably better behaved and I could probably run it in 2 gigs of RAM, but the crashes are annoying.

How many players are you looking at? Any less than 5-8 people (depending on your Internet connection) and I'd consider building your own server machine.

[pieiscool32]

Well, I am testing on my laptop for now, which has about 2 gigs alocated and the server is stringing to support the 5-10 users I have online at a time. Im on an Ubuntu server using McMyAdmin (very user friendly and has TONS of different configs for everything) I am planing to get a nice fancy Dell PowerEdge T310 for a starting server, which I'm going to also do web hosting and file server hosting, and I'm planing on getting an

Intel® Xeon® X3480, 3.06 GHz, 8M Cache, Turbo, HT processor and about 8-16 gigs of ram to start and planing on allocating about 6-10 gigs, because as I found, the server on idle (no one on) it uses like 300MB of ram, granted the map is fairly large, but still, thats quite a bit for idle, and sometimes it spkies up to half a gig on idle!