Beginner VPS Questions

[ElectroPulse]

Hello, all!

I am currently looking into the idea of renting a VPS...

I am wanting to screw around with making a website, maybe make a part of the website where I just have some of my most commonly-used programs that I can download quickly if I am working on someone's computer somewhere, and just whatever else I feel like doing on it.

I also think it'd be cool to have a Minecraft server always online that my friends and I could play on.

...And really whatever else I may think of.

Sure, I could just set up a computer at my house and run all these on there, but the idea of it being in a datacenter with backups and high uptime, and knowing I can always access it, as well as not paying the electric bill of always having a computer set up, just sounds awesome.


So, I did a little looking around at VPSs, and it looks like they aren't very expensive... #3 and #9 here (http://lowendbox.com/blog/top-provider-poll-2013-q4-the-results/#more-4872), for example. $38 or $42/year for 4 (or 8) vCPU cores and 2gb RAM? If that's as plain and simple as it sounds (no strings attached), then that sounds like it would work with whatever I wanted to mess around with on it.

Anyway, I don't really have any specific questions (other than maybe over what period the bandwidth is spread over... I'm guessing 1 year?), more of just wondering whether a VPS is what I should be looking into, how easy it is to just wipe everything and start over (like if I screw up something and just want to start from scratch), what sort of features I should be looking for, and how they work in general (I see that with "We Love Servers,," there is an option in the customize section of the checkout that asks which control panel you want, whereas others seem to ask what OS you want. What's the control panel all about?).

Sorry if this is incoherent... A bit tired right now, so if you need any clarification of what I'm wondering, feel free to ask. Figured I'd throw this out there and see if I can get a better understanding of how VPSs work.

Thanks!
ElectroPulse

 

[aem]

A lot of hosts do not allow Minecraft servers including the two that you mentioned. Always read the Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy (if an AUP exists, some just have TOS).

Often a good idea to avoid yearly deals on LEB. There are not that many budget hosts around that I would trust enough to be around in a year or at least have problems within the year. Also never can trust any included backup, particularly with the budget hosts. Really need to have your own backup solution for any important data.

If you have no web experience, probably easier to start on a cheap shared hosting plan to screw around with making a website.

Bandwidth is per month. It is easy to reinstall an OS and start over on most hosts.

I have not hosted Minecraft servers, but it will likely be hard to find a VPS that can run Minecraft well at the prices you are looking at. You may be able to get by with an inexpensive VPS if not many players and you don't mind some occasional slowdown/lag.

 

[ElectroPulse]

A lot of hosts do not allow Minecraft servers including the two that you mentioned. Always read the Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy (if an AUP exists, some just have TOS).

Often a good idea to avoid yearly deals on LEB. There are not that many budget hosts around that I would trust enough to be around in a year or at least have problems within the year. Also never can trust any included backup, particularly with the budget hosts. Really need to have your own backup solution for any important data.

If you have no web experience, probably easier to start on a cheap shared hosting plan to screw around with making a website.

Bandwidth is per month. It is easy to reinstall an OS and start over on most hosts.

I have not hosted Minecraft servers, but it will likely be hard to find a VPS that can run Minecraft well at the prices you are looking at. You may be able to get by with an inexpensive VPS if not many players and you don't mind some occasional slowdown/lag.

Thanks for the reply! This is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for

Well, that sucks... I knew it was too good to be true Thanks for the heads up on the ToS/AUP! Glad I didn't dive head-long into renting one just yet.

One question I have about that, though... Why wouldn't they allow game servers? If they "guarantee" 2gb of ram, and if you stay within your limits for the CPU usage (which I would think would be a hard limit), why wouldn't they let you run them? Is it shared or something, so not necessarily something they can "guarantee?"

Dang, 1.5/2tb per month? Holy crap, that's a lot... I was thinking it was per year or something.

But yea, thanks for the reply! I now know more of what to look for...

 

[aem]

CPU is almost always shared on a VPS and RAM is sometimes shared. Most hosts oversell their servers to provide services at lower cost on the assumption that users aren't going to be using all of their allocated resources all the time. How oversold the servers are depends on the host.

Game servers are one of the more resource intensive uses and are very commonly targeted with DDoS attacks. For these two reasons many hosts do not allow game servers. Some hosts actually just say no Minecraft.

If you were to host Minecraft for you and you friends, where are you and your friends located? Probably want a server location near the middle of the group of players for the least amount of lag. May be able to suggest some hosts if I have some idea where the server would need to be. Also how many players do you expect to use the servers?

If you want to get advice from those who actually host Minecraft servers though, you would get a lot more help on the lowendtalk forum. I run some game servers but for older games which use very little resources compared to Minecraft. You would also have hosts offering their services as, unlike many forums, they are allowed to do that type of thing there. Not exactly sure what the rules are other than I don't think they can offer any VPS's publicly more than $7/month on LET which is on the low end for running Minecraft. Just try to find some info on the hosts before signing up and again best to pay per month. I probably would trust no more than 10% of the budget hosts on LET/LEB. A lot either tend to have no or extremely slow support, bad uptime, run by kids who don't know what they are doing or don't care, servers too oversold, go out of business, or frequently switch datacenters (especially bad if they move you to a location far from your original location).

I generally have a preference towards the more established cloud services like Digital Ocean or Ubiquity Hosting.

 

[ElectroPulse]

CPU is almost always shared on a VPS and RAM is sometimes shared. Most hosts oversell their servers to provide services at lower cost on the assumption that users aren't going to be using all of their allocated resources all the time. How oversold the servers are depends on the host.

Game servers are one of the more resource intensive uses and are very commonly targeted with DDoS attacks. For these two reasons many hosts do not allow game servers. Some hosts actually just say no Minecraft.

If you were to host Minecraft for you and you friends, where are you and your friends located? Probably want a server location near the middle of the group of players for the least amount of lag. May be able to suggest some hosts if I have some idea where the server would need to be. Also how many players do you expect to use the servers?

If you want to get advice from those who actually host Minecraft servers though, you would get a lot more help on the lowendtalk forum. I run some game servers but for older games which use very little resources compared to Minecraft. You would also have hosts offering their services as, unlike many forums, they are allowed to do that type of thing there. Not exactly sure what the rules are other than I don't think they can offer any VPS's publicly more than $7/month on LET which is on the low end for running Minecraft. Just try to find some info on the hosts before signing up and again best to pay per month. I probably would trust no more than 10% of the budget hosts on LET/LEB. A lot either tend to have no or extremely slow support, bad uptime, run by kids who don't know what they are doing or don't care, servers too oversold, go out of business, or frequently switch datacenters (especially bad if they move you to a location far from your original location).

I generally have a preference towards the more established cloud services like Digital Ocean or Ubiquity Hosting.

Thanks for the reply!

Ah, I suppose that makes sense especially for cheaper VPSs then...

As for where we're located, east coast US. I'm located in WV, going to probably be transferring to a university in TN next school year. All friends are located in the same general area. So, I'm guessing anywhere like New York, Georgia, or even Florida would work (seem to be the most common locations on the east coast).

Also, thank you for the recommendations. I looked them up, but unfortunately the prices are a little higher than I'm willing to pay (at least for now, may change later). It seems that DigitalOcean has some good ratings, so will keep them in mind for the future.

I ran across another company called Evlgaming... They've been running for 3 years now, providing both VPN and standalone Minecraft hosting, so they allow Minecraft hosting within their VPSs. Found them browsing through LowEndTalk, and saw this thread: (http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/20...-off-for-life-kvm-phoenix-kansas-win-nix-1-75). So far it sounds like a pretty good deal, with the 50% off for the life of service. For only $1.75/month or $3.50/month, that's tempting. With 1gb (or just 2x 512mb), I could allocate 512mb to the Minecraft server that should comfortably handle the 2-5 users I am envisioning, and use the rest for anything else I may think of (web hosting, TeamSpeak, private VPS, etc.). Now I need to look up the system requirements for those other services...

Now, I have a few more questions:
1. I've noticed that in a lot of ToSs/AUPs they've said something to the effect of "If you use more than (either specifically stating an amount, or just saying something like "an amount that slows others down") resources, we will warn you or suspend/terminate your VPS." How easy is it to tell what your usage is like, and what they consider "too much?"
2. When renting a VPS, are you usually able to set up multiple partitions and run multiple OSs, or is it usually limited to one?
3. What is the use of more than one IP address? I've seen that some VPSs only offer one, others offer a couple, and some offer an option to buy more. Based on what I've read, you can use 1 IP address for many websites, and as far as I've seen the only use for more is to have multiple HTTPS certificates (or something like that).
4. I've seen people commenting about companies that don't have IPv6 addresses available, basically saying that they weren't interested if IPv6 wasn't available. I've read that IPv6 is more secure, are there any other advantages to it?
5. How do we check how fast the connection is between a host and us? Evlgaming is located in Kansas City, which isn't too far away, but am wondering if it would make much of a difference compared to a host in NY.

 

[aem]

Ubiquity and Digital Ocean are about as cheap as it gets for decent VPS at $4 and $5 month. If you do go above 512mb ram you may find better slightly deals elsewhere though.

Rates like EVL Gaming offers really are not sustainable especially when gaming servers are allowed. They may have been in business for a few years but it looks like they have changed dramatically in the past year. Looking at past offers their rates used to be a lot higher. You could say that their current normal rates are not much less than Ubiquity or Digital Ocean, but these types of hosts always have deals going on so sale rates are basically their regular rates. Looks like they always offer at least 35%.

Paying monthly it may be worth a shot as not much to lose but I'd definitely back up your own data regularly as hosts this cheap often suddenly close down, get hacked, etc. I would be shocked if you could really do anything more with the server in addition to running Minecraft though and maybe very basic web hosting with NGINX or similar HTTP server that uses low memory (no apache). 2x 512 may be better than a single 1GB as it may allow you a bit more CPU usage.

1. It is easy to monitor RAM usage in Linux. I don't think monitoring CPU usage is as easy but still figuring this stuff out myself. I think it more comes down to knowing what you are running and how CPU intensive it is. You can check CPU usage in Linux but not sure how easy it is to tell on a VPS if you are using too much. Some VPS control panels show graphs of resource usage. I am quite confident that if you do much more than Minecraft on EVL Gaming you would be using a lot of CPU.

2. One OS at a time per VPS (can reinstall VPS with another OS).

3. Yes you shouldn't need more than 1 IP address unless you are using SSL certificates. Even then people talk like the technology allow does not require unique IPs. However, the technology to do this is new and I think very few hosts support it yet.

4. Personally I know very little about IPv6 personally as IPv4 is still the current standard and what I work with. I think IPv6 support is still rather limited and for many uses you will need IPv4. IPv4 addresses are running very short though so it is not cheap to add additional IPv4 addresses to a server and hosts usually require you to state the reason why you need additional IPv4 addresses before they will assign them to you.

5. Ping the server with the 'ping <ip address>' or for example 'ping 192.168.1.1' in Windows command prompt or Linux terminal. You can also get a good idea what pings may be elsewhere by using a service that checks pings to lots of locations. EVL Gaming's Kansas location would probably be close enough. Not sure the extra latency from Kansas would be noticeable with something like Minecraft.


Honestly since you are new to running a VPS and kind of just want a VPS to mess around with you might first try Amazon EC2. You can get a free year of a micro instance (VPS) with Amazon EC2. It isn't very complicated to set up and may work well enough for you during the free period. Their normal rates are expensive after that though. Linux EC2 micro instance would likely work well enough for a very small Minecraft server but not sure.