Anyone know good hosting services for a NWN PW? (EST/Central)
Salvanus
Member Posts: 43
Hey all,
Looking to bring back my persistent world, "The Lands of Acheron" from 2004/2005. The server I used to host back then cost $150 a month. Don't know how much things have changed since then, but I want to get it hosted for as cheap as possible.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Looking to bring back my persistent world, "The Lands of Acheron" from 2004/2005. The server I used to host back then cost $150 a month. Don't know how much things have changed since then, but I want to get it hosted for as cheap as possible.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
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OS: Linux (KVM is preferable but is not deal breaker)
CPU: 2-4 cores, 2.8-3.5Ghz
RAM: 4Gb min
Storage: SSD
Bandwidth: unlimited or very high.
Some decent ones:
https://vpsdime.com/
https://buyvm.net/kvm-dedicated-server-slices
https://www.ovh.com/us/vps/vps-ssd.xml
Thanks again!
I think digital ocean's $10 plan is a decent starter too & their setup makes it much easier to move servers around and use a test server (paying hourly only when it is up) versus working with a pure VPS. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
KVM is the hypervisor.
Your old server costs sound pretty high .. if I remember right, LoA didn't have that many areas. I'm curious why it was that much?
If you run into any issues with hosting let me know .. I used to play a gruff rogue/cleric/fighter in green armor on your server
Are you concerned about potentially not having NWNX for your windows server? Is NWNX basically just for SQL database and automatic server restarting in the event of a system restart? I believe that's all I used it for back in 2005 when I was running my PW off of windows 2000 server.
Also if your PW is 100mb in size and the server has 2TB disk space wouldn't that be overkill?
If you plan on leaving the server up 24/7 for players or DM's to use, then a dedicated server is essential. Considering I already have a server that is used to host other games and services, it makes perfect sense to utilize it.
Also, how many players do you think it would take to tax a VPS? what about for a dedicated server? What type of bandwidth would you recommend for 40 players at a time? Do you think the game will be optimized in EE to allow for over 100 players in a PW?
Thanks in advance, been gone for over 10 years, so many questions, so little time!
I can explain how hosting works on Arelith. Most of the optimizatons to the server were ported from niv and my work on 1.69 NWNX, which used data gathered from Arelith at the 96/96 server cap. By their powers combined, these optimizations allow a capped server to run at a much more reasonable level of performance.
At the end of the day, however, the server is still simulated on a single thread, so for ideal performance you want as fast single-core performance as possible. Arelith is hosted on a dedicated server which has a 6700k processor. Three servers are hosted on it, one per physical core, with the final physical core dedicated to DB and web operations.
It's difficult to answer all of your specific questions because the performance characteristics of your server depend entirely on what's going on in your module. For example, if you have placeables scattered around a complex melee battle then your path finding is going to lag no matter what you do. Another example is something that niv found - on his PW a lot of server time was taken by AI sitting down on placeables. On Arelith, a lot of server time was taken sending party combat state to all of the members of the party.
It's not really possible for me to tell you "use a VPS up to x players" because that cap is determined by how you use your module. It could be 5 players or it could be 96 players. The only way to really know is to host it yourself and observe the performance first-hand.
NWNX comes with a built-in profiler which you can use to gather objective criteria of how your server is running. Things such as: where all the time goes each simulation tick, what the tickrate is, how much network traffic is being processed, script timings on a per-area and per-object basis, pathing timings on a per-creature and per-area basis, object counts, player counts per area, and more.
I would think it would be more prudent to start out with a minimum option and see how that meets your needs before investing all in.
1) I'm currently just running my PW randomly when I'm home using the nwserver that came with NWN:EE - is there a NWNX install that works for NWN:EE, or is that in the works? (I'm on windows10).
2) Back in the day I used NWNX just for mySQL database stuff for the CNR system, and I also believe it started the server up again in the event of the dedicated server crashing. Will those capabilities come with NWN:EE nwserver?
3) Is there a better tradeskill system than CNR now? CNR required the mysql db to remember people's progress anytime they exited the server, and it was a pain. I'm thinking about just gutting all the CNR stuff out of my server for now, since I'm beginning to slowly remember things and it would be way easier to remove that stuff for now.
4) When I managed to gut the CEP1 stuff and import CEP2.62 into my module last night, almost everything aside from some invisible chairs seemed to be plug n play, which was a relief. I thought none of the CEP1 stuff was going to convert. Someone very helpful that I talked to yesterday told me to not to bother with the modified and new tilesets that come with CEP2.62, so I didn't import them into my module. He said they were pretty bloated. Would you agree, or do you think they look good enough to use?
5) Is NWN 1.74 that you mentioned the name of NWN:EE? To my knowledge, 1.69 was the last bioware patch.
Thank you again for your time, I really appreciate with you guys are doing!
https://www.1and1.com/vps-hosting
We are pretty full (I think I host 10-12 PW's ATM, but I still need to get the last two dedicated hosts operational, then we can host 6 more), but I think I may have one or two openings atm.
https://www.stillevande.com