Hi all,
Many people (myself included) have desired to host professional-class bzflag servers, but have not had the means to obtain a host with enough bandwidth, etc. Some of these people run their servers on home connections (which in many cases is against the terms of service their their ISP), but have trouble with connection reliability, and often have high lag and/or high jitter problems. Also, most home connections have very limited bandwidth to begin with, and have enough capacity for 10-15 players.
The obvious alternative is to pay $70 - $150 per month for a dedicated server. However, since many of these people are students or young kids, they do not have the financial resources to support such a server. Even those who [i]can[/i] pay the amount are often not interested in such a high monthly payment for a computer game server. It is, after all, just a game.
Some people have managed to find others willing to host their servers, while other people have been able to find a company or school who is willing to donate the resources. While in an ideal world we would all be so lucky, when it really comes down to it everything in this world comes with a price.
Because I believe that having high-quality servers for bzflag is important, and I would like to make hosting possible for as many people as possible, I am considering heading up a shared host with good speed and capacity on an extremely fast and reliable connection. I was considering purchasing dedicated server hosting for business and personal reasons (very light use services), and this would allow me to allocate all the extra bandwidth to people who would like to use it for their bzflag servers.
Please note that this is not a commercial endeavor of any kind; all users would be sharing in the cost of renting the server on a fair and equitable basis. The server would be configured so that resources are allocated fairly to all users. Users would also have to agree to reasonable terms of service so that the rights of the other users are not compromised.
The particular server I am looking at right now will have an average monthly capacity of 2.5mb - 3mb [i]continuous[/i] bandwidth availble (although the actual connection capacity at any given moment will be several times this). For general-purpose users, I've worked out a preliminary monthly pricing plan, which will include:
1GB storage space
4 network ports for bzfs (more available at small additional cost)
Apache virtual host configuration
Player slot allowance at rate of $0.25 per slot up to 20 slots (special arrangements available for more slots)
We may chose to do virtual private servers (VPS), in which case settings would be slightly different. The per-slot monthly cost may vary slightly from this if/when this gets underway. As you can see this plan is targeted at the smaller (currently home-run) servers. For users with special needs and/or very popular servers.
I will be designing/building/configuring the server, settings, info website, control panel website, etc.