NAT is not crucial IMHO. Real dedicated servers will have a public IP. Requiring this may seem a barrier of entry to hosting DayZ, but maybe that's a good thing. IP6 is growing in use too and NAT will be a thing of the past. Not sure lots of home based servers will help or hurt DayZ. Probably do more harm then good if run by admins that don't understand port forwarding or can't afford a public IP, possibly because they can't get one on their cheap dodgy consumer broadband.

DayZ is a mod for ARMA2, a military simulator (aimed at the consumer market). ARMA2 already had persistent missions before DayZ came along. DayZ did not invent persistent missions or saving data to a database. So in direct response to OP, yes it has been discussed, and already achieved (but always room for improvement).

Can you give a little more info? Are existing customers going to be able to stay on their current plans for the foreseeable future?

They are no longer available on their ordering page. You could select Australia (Sydney) from the list a few days ago. Not sure yet as to what happened, but by their prices, I honestly couldn't see how they could stay in business here unless they were under the assumption most of their customers would have empty servers.

Honestly, I think your nit picking. You had an increase in ping of 40ms so you cancelled the server? Riiight. They are the cheapest (too cheap IMHO) option for DayZ in Australia, so who are you going to go with now? You could have stuck with the server, and asked to be set up in Adelaide when one become available. Looks like you were just looking for a way to cancel your account to be honest. I'm more curious how you find their performance, as they are selling those severs quite cheap, and I think the fact they offer 100 slot servers in Australia is bigger attempt at false advertising then getting the states wrong for the server location.

HFB sell "slots", like Hypernia, GameServers, and other GSPs. All of those companies restrict what the customers can access on the system. You usually have to use the Control Panel to restart the game, or upload a new mission, etc. So what they're doing, isn't "that" bad. They have to do it because of the rules DayZ Devs are enforcing, which means they (HFB) have to be even more heavy handed because all their customers share resources (and the same IP). Each customer (AFAIK) does not have a unique IP address for example, so if one person breaks the rules, it can take down a half dozen customers. Customer 1 decides to edit his server.cfg (same place the MOTD is) and change the name to "HOSTED BY JOHNY. DAYZ v1.7.2.5". That would get several customers banned Customer 1 decides to edit the DayZ mission, and allow all chat channels, upload it. Gets several customers banned. etc,etc

It's not DayZ problem if your server doesn't appear on "the list". Your server reports to GameSpy, which is what all the server browsers query to discover all the ARMA2 servers in the world. First make sure your arma2oa.exe loads correctly, and check what the console says.Mmake sure it's not saying "BattlEye initialization failed" for example. I would mention the server.cfg file too, and the ReportingIP line, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt in being smart enough to use Google to check you have that set up correctly.

Depends how you interpret their email. I understood it to be like everything else that comes from DayZ.... ie "U MUST DO THIS" So I expect all DayZ servers will be upgrading to beta 95054, and requiring it from all connecting clients... One day the DayZ guys will think about the thousands of dumb users that don't know how to download and install the beta because they just got the game, or have been relying on Six Launcher to keep them updated.

ts.ausarma.org (TeamSpeak address) You will find up to 100 DayZ players on their during the evenings. If you play on our servers, there is usually always an admin around to help with problems, restart servers, punish hackers, etc. Groups can also set up their own TS channels and forums.

Is this happening on the AusArmA servers as well? We get time dilation though after the mission has been running a while, but I haven't heard players mention large/long periods of dsync.

Well as you did say "Australian Servers" and not "HFB Servers", it wouldn't be off-topic to say our provider does the exact same deal for $225. We actually pay $350 for each of our servers, but that's with 4TB+ of bandwidth so we run 2x50 per box (i.e $175 each) and running on E3 1240's. If your staff aren't overworked though and you can provide set-up, updates, and support for your customers, it would still be worthwhile for people who are willing to pay for someone else to do it.

I ping to NZ (from Australian East Coast) with about 47ms :P

Data sent to Hive will be very minimal, less than 1GB per month. 1x 50 slot server will use up to 6GB per hour, but usually average about 4.5GB per hour (IN+OUT). 4Mbps is about right for 1x 50 slot. It can spike up to 10Mbps though occasionally but if you limited it to 6Mbps it would probably be okay.

No, it's been renamed to AU 5.

Public DayZ servers, just need: 1x core per 50 slots (3GHz+, post-2010 CPU should be fine) 3GB RAM 5-10Mbps 2.5TB per month (in+out, out is typically 60-70%) That is just the "current" requirements. It's gone up and down in the past 3 months though, so you could oversell to your customers next week when Rocket releases some new feature/bug that eats up CPU. A few hosts are already providing DayZ servers for rent (per slot), with control panel access. These aren't your typical large scale GSP's though. http://www.hfbservers.com/ Resources per slot probably isn't your biggest issue to address. It will be to find a way to address the constant updates, poor server performance, and frequent restarts. Customers will be paying you for a service that is extremely unreliable, so distancing yourself from the blame will be very difficult. If GA don't offer Minecraft server rentals, I'd be very surprised if they can offer DayZ. Remember, currently DayZ do NOT allow private servers, and they must have at least 40 slots! Even if you priced it same as ARMA2 slots ($2.50) it would be $120 p/m for a server they cannot make exclusive to paying members. Matt doesn't answer emails much any more, and the old dayzdevs@gmail is ignored too. Your best bet is probably to go through their new ticketing system. http://support.dayzmod.com/

If you play on ANZ1-ANZ5, visit our forums and subscribe to our "DayZ Status Updates" thread. Yes, there was some serious routing issues going on all around Australia last night, including links to NZ. Google DNS was completely broken for some people to. Maybe you'll read about it in some IT blog today. Our ping to ON3 (NZ) was sub-20ms, but pings to Orcon (NZ) were over 200ms, so definitely a routing issue with a major outage somewhere along the line. One player said he had high pings and told me he was on Dodo. http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/dodo-takes-blame-for-internet-outage-affecting-millions-20120223-1tpqq.html High pings last night only affected people on certain ISP's as far as I am aware.

Who is "we" at GameArena? I checked your age, so I'm just a little doubtful you're in the server provisioning department, or have much connection to those that make those decisions. Help desk maybe? That's not to be rude, but I've been around the internet long enough... If you are talking about someone high up enough to make decisions, they can find cm. or myself on TeamSpeak (ts.ausarma.org) and we'll answer any questions. They can even call me on my mobile. We aren't DayZ staff, but can answer anyone's questions in one go, and save a lot of time. It's just if GameArena were serious, they would already have given this task to one (or several) competent employees and given them some spare resources to start with. 400+ DayZ servers should tell you if GA were really kicking their feet in confusion, people would need to lose their jobs... GA are smart though, they know about DayZ, and staff would have already done their research and determined it's not a very feasible venture.... maybe why vast, vast, vast majority of DayZ servers are run by the community...

You want a cheap server, rent one from the USA, around California and Seattle area's as they offer lowest pings to the East coast of Australia. The trouble with this is you're basically paying for a server for the American's to play on. You can get your mates and tell them to play on your server, but aside from your small group of pals, 90% of the players on the servers will be Americans. Most Australians won't even filter for USA servers too. Believe it or not, but there's over 5,000 players that have tried out DayZ from Australasia! (hell we get 1,000 players on-line in the evenings) If you want to host in Australia, contact us at www.ausarma.org. We'll set you up with our host and offer you same low price we're paying. You can also share a box to save even more money, but you're still looking around $200 p/m. I honestly think you're wasting your time if you ever think you'll be able to rent affordable servers from GameArena to host DayZ. I will also tell you the same thing I told every other 'potential' DayZ host in Australia, which is the cold hard truth about running DayZ servers. So far, everyone who expressed interest has changed their minds afterwards... It takes a lot of effort to run DayZ, costs a lot, and you get nothing out of it. So basically you just have to be "in it for the community", and if that's the case, you may as well help out AusArmA. We'll put up as many servers as we can afford, and take on as many admins as is necessary (assuming their integrity and skills are sufficient). When DayZ finally get their shit together.... then GameArena and the other GSP's can enter the market.... until then.... its up to us players to stick together.

Hell no, I was typing hypothetically. The ping limit on ANZ1-ANZ5 is 180ms, which is what it's stayed at for past few months since our first server went up. Last I checked, ANZ7-8 has about 220ms, and NZ servers have 100-200ms ping limits. Who in Au/NZ allows 300+ pings I have no idea... I think the OP was exaggerating. We've expressed a desire to host a local Au/NZ Hive database, but understand it adds more complexity for the developers. One day, hopefully they'll be at a stage they can offer multiple Hives located around the globe to improve performance, and then Australasia will get it's own Hive server. We will then have equal performance as the US servers, because the Gbps backbone's aren't even required. The only difference between AU and US is ping to Hive (plus we just pay more for our bandwidth, but that's just $$$).

You know you can take down wire with a toolbox, or are they still not available since the last patch... haven't played in a while so I can't remember.

I need help from your team .... is anyone in Cherno?

I don't know any ANZ servers that allow pings over 250ms... so where are players supposedly seeing all these 400+ ping Americans? Can't please players either way. Lower the ping and players cry that they are in Brisbane, on Telstra Cable, can't get under 220ms ping (yet I'm in the same situation, and get 27ms ping, funny that). Raise it too high, and American's get in, so another player cries about that.

Pretty sure Hive went down for about 20 minutes or so. Looks to be back up. Couldn't even ping Hive from different countries so almost certain it went down for a short period.

You kind of lost me as to why you need to buy a server license for each instance. That seems a waste of money and resources, unless you're wanting to resell to individual customers who only want to host a single server. You could also get away with Windows Server 2008 R2 Web edition. As for CALs, best to double-check, but I don't believe you need CALs for a game server, unless you are having users authenticate with Microsoft credentials (such as domain accounts, file/print sharing, etc). Based on the riskiness of DayZ, and it's unpredictable nature, I'd be going with SPLA option anyway on a month-by-month basis. 30 instances using 200Mbps sounds achievable. Just 1x 50 slot server can spike over 10Mbps though, but this can be mitigated by lowering the bandwidth settings in the arma2.cfg and balanced over 30 instances shouldn't be an issue.

To run it yourself, you'll be looking at around $300. I really don't want to be rude mate, but you need to treat hosting a DayZ server a little more seriously, if you want to be taken seriously.