Been thinking about it for a very long time, as long as it wasn't necessary I delayed it. But now the server is growing, slowly but steadily, it's gonna become a necessity soon, specially to avoid lag.
What it means in short:
+ less lag
+ more future-oriented (if we wanna go 200+ player it's a must)
- more costy of course
- server will be down a few hours when comes the time to transition
If you don't like computer mumbojumbo you can stop reading here lol but if you don't mind read on, and if you have comments/suggestions on my plan they'll be most welcome.
My current home connection (10mps) is great, it's the best I can get in terms of personal connection where I live, you can't even get that in all countries. But we've reached the limit of the home-connection, to get better than that we need the server to be hosted professionally.
I'm considering iweb:
http://iweb8.com/
iweb are leaders in their domain as I understand, and they are hosted in my home town which is a nice plus. It's what GM-Ben (one of the other starting admin here, who left a while back to start his own server) had chosen for his server and since he's far more aware than me in these department I trust his judgment. iweb might be a little more expensive than some cheap offers I see when browsing other hosting services, but at least I'm sure they are reliable. I'd rather pay a little more but be certain of what we get. They offer 24h uptime garantee and live support, it looks entirely professional and we'd be in good hands with them, it's not some cheap re-seller who splits the resources and oversells their half-working shared servers (I've heard bad stories hehe).
More specifically, I'm looking at their colocation option (what that means is I bring them the server computer and they only charge me for renting the space in their facility, as oppose to paying for one of their computer server there). Seems it would cost $119 monthly for having our server on 100Mbps port. It's not that bad actually, and considering I don't have to re-install everything on a new computer is very welcome from my point of view, it's much less hassle for me.
The server has donation buffer (accumulated donations) to pay for well over 6 months, even if we didn't I could probably absorb the cost but obviously I'd rather not pay it all out of my own pocket. I'm happy we have generous donators who are willing to help the server ^_^ still, if we ever ran out of donation funds to pay I still wouldn't bother people for donations, those will always be voluntary, so no worry in that department.
So whatcha guys think? Well obviously faster connection is good and I'm sure no one would object to less lag, but aside from that, any input?
Putting the thread in suggestion section, cuz it's still just that, looking at our options before taking a decision.
