Good day. I have been conducting a little research during my free time.
What I have done is I have built a (simple) web crawler in Java that analyzes The Minecraft Forum Servers for ever server ip on the site (I might do more sites later). There’s a dump of them here. The code for the web crawler is here.
It works by using Jsoup to connect to the page, analyzing the page for <span> tags and grabbing any value in the class b-list-host-name. It then stores those values (the ips) in a text file. Then I created a reader to read the text file and scan for any letter in the alphabet (essentially signifying a domain address) and removing it from the list, That can be found here. That created this dump here.
What does all of this mean? There are 11710 ip addresses in total, 6309 of those addresses are ipv4 and the rest are using a domain. Using simple math, one can calculate that 54% (when rounded) are ipv4. I’ve created a chart to aid in this:
What use is this? Well, none really (it was really a project to test my skills) but I have wanted to spark a discussion on this and release these statistics.
What are your thoughts on these statistics?
Which do you prefer when joining servers, joining with an ipv4 or domain addresses?
If you were to have a server (or if you already do), would you have (or already have) ipv4 or a domain server address?
Edit:
After some work and a little bit of waiting, I have three more sites gathered.
Minecraft-mp: Full Dump Ipv4 Dump
Planet Minecraft:
PMC was being a pain, with loads of http and socket errors, plus the fact that it wouldn’t let me map all of the server ips. So here is what I got for now: Full(ish) Dump Ipv4 Dump
Code
Because of the incomplete data, I didn’t bother to make a pie chart, however I do have the percentages:
Ipv4: 21%
Domain: 79%
This is an interesting study, however at least on minecraft forum servers there are either A ) servers with multiple domain names: i.e. ( us.mineplex.com && eu.mineplex.com ), or B ) people who just barely started out servers. So perhaps get a bigger data set? But overall pretty interesting.
I personally prefer a domain addresses because I know the owner at least spent the 5 seconds it takes, or invested the extra $5 bucks it takes to run the server.
I personally have run multiple servers, and all have a domain server address.
I prefer to join servers that have a domain name, thier not hard to get, or setup, it shows the owner can at least pay the extra $10 or so for a domain name.
My former server hoster owns the “minecraft.to” domain (and some other gaming domains). When you rent a server, you can choose a subdomain for your server
Each site contains the ip addresses differently. For example, Minecraft Forums stores their data along with the main server listings in <span> tags in a class b-list-host-name. However sites like Planet Minecraft require that you go to each page to get the ip (unless you used some insane code to read banners but that would be overkill). Therefore each site requires a (very) slightly different collector. Check OP for them all.
I don’t quite understand what exactly you’re trying to point out with your graph (although it looks interesting). I quoted the above specifically, because you say there are 11710 ip addresses, yet only 6309 are ipv4. Are you saying the rest are ipv6? or are you saying the rest use DNS (pet peeve #1 when people advertise a server and say the ip is <insert domain name>). Not trying to offend or bash you at all just wondering if there is some incorrect terminology being used.
The only other thing that would make this look even more interesting is if for the addresses (that I assume are domain names) if you could display which ones are using SRV records as well.
I’ve got two servers on the same WAN IP, so by using SRV records players never need to know which port to use when connecting. Another pro to DNS is that if you are home hosting and have a dynamic IP then you don’t need to tell players the new IP every couple weeks as long as you’re updating the DNS record to point to the new IP by some means.
again this looks very interesting, I always enjoy seeing people putting together statistics/graphs on random things that most people tend to not even think about.
The rest are domain (DNS), forgot to mention that in OP, will edit.
I hadn’t even thought about SRV records, I will try to get that when I have the time.
There is a common misconception in the gaming community that a domain name address is actually an IP address, and the latter term is used for both. An IP address will, in the case of IPv4 be 4 numbers separated by punctuations (yes, there are other ways to represent the same data, but ignore that for now). I realize that this is completely off-topic, but the way you phrase it is incorrect, and it’s “triggering my self-diagnosed OCD” (hehehe).
Actually an IPv4 adress is defined as a 32bit number and an IPv6 address is defined as a 128bit number. IPv4 addresses are usually displayed as a sequence of four unsigned bytes separated by some kind of delimiter (typically .). IPv6 adresses are usually displayed as a sequence of 16bit-sized blocks in hexadecimal representation delimited by :. Trailing 0s may be omitted in the human-readable representation.
Doesn’t this thread go about server owners that figured out how to get a domain? I am pretty sure that the OP knows that a domain is just a nice name for an IP (trying to make it simple lol).
Actually, the fact that you can interpret a string of 32 ones and zeros as a number doesn’t mean the thing you are trying to describe with the string is a number. That’s like saying the word “nitpicking” is an 80-bit number because that’s how many bits it takes to represent the word in ASCII encoding.
“Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”
From the famous Magritte painting.
The characters 2 and 3 positioned right next to each other in that order (“23”) are not a number, but a string of symbols representing a number, which itself is just a representation of a quantity of 23. In the same way, the 32 bits that the various name resolvers eventually return to you when you type “google.com” into your browser are just a representation of an IPv4 address, even though you can interpret them as you please. So no, an IPv4 address is not a number - it is an IPv4 address. The most common way to represent these addresses is the dotted-decimal notation. There’s certainly nothing wrong in representing it as a single base 10 number - but the parody on The Wizard of Oz is in fact not “there’s no place like 2130706433”, and you will probably not have much luck getting an actual website up by typing a base 10 number into your address bar.
On a more serious note, I find the OP’s question somewhat nonsensical. Domain names were invented because IP addresses are stupidly hard to remember and make sense of. It’s like asking people if they prefer to do things the easy way or the hard way when the result is the exact same (for all intents and purposes).
See RFC