So recently I’ve been toying with the idea of migrating from a Minecraft host company to a VPS hosting company (which most ‘hardcore’ server owners seem to suggest for price point and customization), although, there’s a few details I’d just like to ask opinions on. Note that I don’t want to start a flame war, just looking for suggestions.
Currently, I have MineOS running on VirtualBox, and it looks decent, although the panel is a bit annoying. Does anyone else have ideal setups on VPSs? I’m not sure if it’s wise, but thinking it may also be worth putting a web server on the VPS alongside the MC server, and also an FTP server. What Linux distro would you suggest? Maybe share other details of how you’d set up your VPS with MC if you’re familiar with it.
Any useful tips or suggestions as to how to go about this would be appreciated. It’s not a definite, but it’s something I think I’d like to mess with, and maybe dumb it down for me. I’m not an avid Linux user, and my Linux class was a year or two ago.
I would suggest you use either Ubuntu/Debian or a CentOS, make sure you have a lot RAM at your disposal and a powerful CPU (remember that Minecraft more or less only runs on one core). On Ubuntu/Debian the java package you need is openjdk-7-jre-headless. In order to keep the server running when you log out you either have to use the nohuputility or a bit fancier and easier screen.
Administer it via SSH and use SFTP for filetransfers. If your server is laggy, you may wan’t to use Spigot instead of vanilla/bukkit. With enough RAM you can also load your entire World into a so called ramdisk, speeding up chunkloading a lot. If you have the money, an SSD can also help.
If you don’t feel comfortable using the shell for administering the server, you may be better off with a hosted solution. For convenience you may also install tools like mcadmin.
Some general notes:
change your sshd port, don’t use 22
don’t run the server as root!
java has many startparameters that boost your server such as -server or the -Xmx and -Xms, google what’s best for minecraft servers
Sounds alright. I’ve had bad luck with ramdisks though for some reason. May have just been a derpy host, but they did use ramdisks. Our server suffered a lot of shut-downs, and when asking the host, they said we were overloading the ramdisk, however that may work. Wasn’t very stable at any rate.
For the OS, for simplicity and compatibility use Debian-Comandline-only. For speed and space try to flash a rom chip with Core only from tinycore, it’s about 8Mb and is designed to be run directly from the rom chip alongside the BIOS, but it also works well installed on the hard disk.
As a note on flashing a rom chip with an entire OS; this is as fast as it gets on any hard where, the rom chip often runs as fast as ram, so in one ram cycle the whole OS can be loaded into ram, and some things, especially kernel instructions needn’t even be loaded into ram as they can be accedes with the same speed directly from the rom chip.
For my part, my Minecraft server was on a VPS. The problem I had was a slow access speed to CPU and Hard Disk. VPS is good for a web server or a development server, but not for Minecraft or any high CPU usage applications. But, probably my experience was on a too cheap VPS.
Yes the VPS has the advantage to be more customizable, but when this is time to add memory or CPU, the price raise extremely rapidly.
This is why I am on a dedicated server now.
Today, some companies, like OVH can rent dedicated servers at the same price, or for less expensive than a VPS.
For Linux, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu (command line) are good choice. You can find a lot of support on Internet.
Agreeing with @Tabinol here. Once you get to a certain point the performance to the price gets beter with a Dedicated server.
Personally, I always use CentOS. It’s not hard to learn. Just ‘wget’ the files, or use sftp (FTP over SSH). I have never really toyed with MineOS, but, It’s probably not as good as CentOS or Ubuntu.
I thought there’d probably be a more ideal OS. The perk of MineOS primary seems to be that it’s pre-configured to run Minecraft, and is controlled via a pre-installed control panel you can access via web, but still retains shell access ofc.
Didn’t even consider a dedicated server, slipped my mind entirely.