Looking for other home hosts

[EyeintheSky]

Hey I own and manage a smallish community for about 2 years now. I jumped right into tekkit not knowing a thing and then launching a server just days later on my gaming rig with huge success and popularity.

After awhile and through some donations I was able to build a dedicated server in house for all our needs. It runs anything we need it to and much more. I also have a raspberry pi running a small file server which hosts our modpack download, community files, community texture packs, and our channel log website.

I was just looking to see how many others out there are doing similar things as us and what kind of hardware you guys are running.

Here is what we are rocking. Very much overkill but it works great.

Case: BitFenix Shinobi

MotherBoard: ASRock B75M R2.0 LGA 1155 Intel B75

CPU: Intel Core i5-3470 Ivy Bridge 3.2GHz (3.6GHz Turbo Boost)

RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance LP 16GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600

Boot Drive:GB WD Black Notebook Drive

Storage: HDD 1x WD 1TB Green

Adding a second 1TB Green in the near future

PSU: Corsair CX430M 430w Modular

I run Centos 6 as our OS. I used to use Ubuntu but I prefer centos for this sort of stuff.

My Speed information. The upload is more important here than the download of course.

I am fortunate enough to have gotten the donations to build the server and still very fortunate to have capable internet.

Heres my personal pros and cons of home hosting. If you want to mention more go for it.

Pros:

- Full control over all updates, content, plugins, and databases.

- I control maintenance times

- No monthly bill. Though the system cost around $640 total It has already paid for itself.

Cons:

- Biggest con is power or internet outages at the host site

- Though through 2 years experience we have found ways to safely stop, save, and backup files in these situations.

- No support. You either know what you are doing or you don't. The internet is a great place to find info but if something breaks its on you to fix it. I taught myself enough linux to get this going and I am still learning everyday to better player experience. Luckily we have some network and server admins in our community that can help out if need be.

Just thought this could be a cool post and maybe turn into a resource pool for other home server hosts.

Feel free to check us out at : http://www.secondarygaming.us/

Feel free to contact me with interests in me hosting a server for you!

[rcmaehl]

1. That's a desktop, you shouldn't run a server on it.

2. "No monthly bill" - Not true, you still are paying a monthly bill in added electricity costs.

3. You're using non-Solid State Media for your server. Either switch to an SSD or a RAMDISK or that HDD will be dead in a year or two with voltz, tekkit classic, tekkit, and various other modpacks.

4. "Full control over all updates, content, plugins, and databases." If you find a good enough minecraft server host, or actually get a full fledged server host (including SSH, Web, etc, all on a single machine) you can control all of this.

5. For the same price you could have gotten 3 to 4 times the cores by building an server machine instead of a desktop.

6. I only see 3 fans giving your case a probable total of 4 fans when including the front intake fan, 1 of which looks like it's jurryrigged in. I doubt your build runs very cool, especially with a stock intel cooler instead of a higher end cooler such as water cooling or a Hyper 212 Evo.

[EyeintheSky]

1. This is a home server. Im not trying to run a company on this. Its minecraft.

2. My monthly bills have not increased past anything that I would not already need. I already pay an electric bill which hasnt moved and the internet is what I started with when Verizon fios came to this area.

3. SSDs are not needed. Though 1 is on its way for our server to cut down on backup times and the 1TB Green will be used for the backups and such. I'm confident in my hardware though sufficient back up measures are in place.

4. This is true, but not in all cases. This is 100% mine and I rely on no one. I can host anything I want on this server. I choose to host certain things on the Raspberry pi because I was gifted a few and wanted to see what I could do with them. I'm happy with this set up. It works. No need to change it.

5. For this price, no. I did the homework and decided this was the way that best suited my needs and what I wanted to do with the machine.

6. The server runs over very little load and the temperatures are way below anything worth blinking an eye at. I have one rear exhaust, the exhaust from the PSU(Not doing much but something is better than nothing) 1 fan is providing direct airflow to the main HDD keeping it colder than your opinions. This build runs cooler than my cell phone under normal load. An intel cooler does the job just fine. This is not a gaming rig. Suggesting to water cool a server which runs near idle most of the time tells me you really arent 100% on what you are talking about. The stock intel fan is a piece of junk and is more than capable of handling CPUs under heavy loads. Only after you get into games that are under a sustained load or until you begin turboing or overclocking a CPU do you need to move into higher air cooling and ultimately water cooling if you wish.

Again, this is a home server for minecraft and some source servers. I'm not trying to run the world greatest server hosting company. Over the past 2 years we have been hosting several heavy load modpacks servers for us and friends of the community with 0 issues and 0 performance worries. We have ran, Tekkit, DW20, Unleashed, Mindcrack, and our currently our custom modpack: http://www.technicpack.net/modpack/details/go-for-launch.194565

Along side a vanilla server, a creative vanilla, several skyblock servers, and another custom server for a friend. No issues. No worries. World files are backed up, compressed, and sent to the raspberry pi for safe keeping if we need them.

You do not need a Xeon series board/CPU and a server rack with 8 HDDs to accomplish something as trivial as hosting minecraft servers.

And as my first build in server configuration and operation I think we have done more than well for ourselves and the whole journey has been an awesome learning experience which I will reflect on when we upgrade to a larger platform in the future.

[rcmaehl]

1. It's still a server and could be built like one for the best performance

2. -

3. I redact my earlier statement based on the fact most widely used mods don't cause disk thrashing.

4. I understand

5. -

6. Water cooling was an extreme example for those server that use modpacks which do a large quantity of block updates or have a high quantity of players.

[EyeintheSky]

Right it could be. But at the core what is a server besides a desktop using parts specifically designed to run all the time under heavy load and sometimes high heat.Of course their are more differences than that on the board and how certain controllers work. But we dont really need any of that right now. It works perfect for what we need it to and I love it! I do however have a nice chunk of newegg giftcard money I was gifted at Christmas so some new storage options are in the works.

Honestly though I've never heard of water cooling in any server example. Would be interesting to see though.

The future build I have planned will indeed be built on more server specific parts. I kind of hoped into a server not knowing if any of this was going to go anywhere so I stayed cheaper with the parts. Its still runs everything we need like a beast so I love it lol.

Would still love to see if their are any other home hosts out there willing to share some info.

Thanks for checking us out rcmaehl.

[rcmaehl]

No problem, I'll probably hop on your server some time January and check out your modpack, it seems interesting.