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Should Beamdog offer a server & community hosting service?

SelpheaSelphea Member Posts: 23
NWN as we know is a unique game that doesn't exist solely as a game.

When people want to start a server there's a lot of questions to think about. How to build the technical stack? Windows or Linux? NWNX or no? How to solve for security, leaks and crashes? Where should the community be hosted? How to make sure people can see news, updates and other announcements and report bugs? And so on.

Services like Vultr and AWS offer a one-click WordPress setup. I wonder if it would be possible to white label AWS or another provider's servers to offer a one-click NWServer + NWNX instance service combined with a community page hosted on Beamdog, similar to guilds on the old Bioware Social Network.

The possible benefit is that most NWN servers don't need a whole lot of resources. Even the $5 tier on most services is more than enough for a simple PW that never goes over 10 players. So there'd be more efficiency there. On the builder's side it means they can focus on building without worrying about the tech stack and maintenance could be as straightforward as uploading a mod file and clicking Reboot Server. I'd fully expect people using this service will have to pay but the combined package would be more attractive than other options.

Another plus is that hosting on Beamdog's ecosystem means there's a possibility to do a lot of integration. Like if there's a forum provided with the server, on the server browser there could be a button to go straight to the forum for more info. Importantly also is that the server owner doesn't need to create their own external forum anymore since everyone here already has a Beamdog account. If these forums are meant to be a community hub this is one way to bring things together.
Drakonpscythe

Comments

  • DrHappyAngryDrHappyAngry Member Posts: 1,577
    There is a docker image here
    https://hub.docker.com/r/beamdog/nwserver/

    There was some discussion on this over here, particularly for nwnx
    https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/67157/server-download-packages-and-docker-support/p1

    I haven't played with it before, but AWS does support docker these days, so it should be possible to import the image.

    I could be way off on this, but isn't the one click wordpress on AWS offered by amazon, themselves? I don't know if a 3rd party can create something quite like that. It shouldn't be hard at all to make a community AMI, though it'd still need a bit of manual tweaking after spinning it up, ie server name and adding modules and such. Some of it could probably be scripted out with something like opsworks or maybe pass along userdata to run-instance, or possibly just include a script to run when you first login to auto-configure some of it.
  • KethaKetha Member Posts: 10
    Should Beamdog offer a server & community hosting service?


    ummm ... not unless Beamdog wants to?
    NeverwinterWights
  • NeverwinterWightsNeverwinterWights Member Posts: 339
    IF Beamdog did something like this I'd probably play on it but I dont think they should or need to do it.
  • FreshLemonBunFreshLemonBun Member Posts: 909
    I think it would be beneficial to a certain niche, obviously I don't think that it should be intended for a larger market because I doubt they could justify the investment. On the other hand I think that if they could offer game server hosting for a reasonable premium it would reduce obstacles some ppl have with hosting a pw.
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