Australian Server Rentals

[dontblamecows 5]

Hi there all, first time posting here but I was wondering if I could get a little help on renting a server.

I'm based in Australia, and am obviously looking to rent/purchase a server for DayZ. I've noticed a few American ones offering slot based servers, or the chance to just outright buy a dedicated server, however I think I'd be more interested in buying just slots.

Currently over here our VPS's are quite expensive due to our data exchanges being quite "less" powerful. I know that GameArena are in the talks with DayZ staff in-order to get some servers going on their behalf, but so far they haven't been able to push forward due to the requirements needed for allowing admin access.

So the question is, where could I find a decent host for a DayZ server? I noticed most of the ANZ servers are running just a VPS, but I was also wondering if any overseas companies were offering servers in Australia for cheap.

[jonnerz 33]

Due to the bandwidth requirements of DayZ, I doubt there will currently be any Australia server offerings for 'cheap'.

Your best bet would be to wait for a current Australian GSP to work out a way to host them.

[dontblamecows 5]

Seems the most likely option. I'll just have to keep asking GameArena then...

[StrikeGTX 3]

Cheapest Australian offering at the moment is getting in with the guys at AusARMA.

That being said Aus Servers are all crap in comparison to US servers up to 250ms.

[Freeborne (DayZ) 7]

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.

[dontblamecows 5]

Sounds about right. Thanks for the info, and hopefully you guys are able to get more servers online.

Currently we at GameArena are looking at hosting a bunch of servers, we have the capacity and want to do it, but we just can't get into contact with anyone to figure out some of the security issues.

If any server admins for DayZ are reading this, could you please send me a direct message and we can hopefully get something started in the works.

[Freeborne (DayZ) 7]

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...

[Malthius 1]

froodleme is on staff with Mammoth Media (the company behind GameArena), and he's done what he said in this thread. I work with him every day, I'm "high up enough to make decisions", and he's asking me about this issue regularly.

GameArena wants to run public DayZ servers, and I can arrange whatever resources that requires, but we have two non-technical issues to overcome. The person who we were using as a contact on the DayZ team hasn't replied for a while. I've sent an email today to another person on the DayZ team to see if we can restart the conversation.

I can't make any guarantees about offering it as a rental option - the economics of offering a server for rent is very different from offering it as a service to the community. Once we have a few servers publicly available we'll be able to evaluate the resources required per slot.

If anyone on the DayZ team wants to contact me about this, my contact email is in my forum profile.

[Freeborne (DayZ) 7]

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/

[cm. (DayZ) 28]

5-10mb/s isn't realistic for 40-50 slots.

we eat up about 25-35mbps with two 50 slot servers, I would go for a minimum 10/15mbit per 40/50 slot server. Also the "1 server per core" isn't really realistic either. On one of our boxes, we run 3x50 slot servers each with one core (E3-1240). The difference though is we run the 4th core for our OS, firedeamon, batch files, log parser, log compression (our logs get big.. 1GB per server per day pretty much), scheduled tasks, RDP session etc etc.

If we ran a server on each of the 4 cores you would struggle to do anything on it as it would be using 100% CPU usage 16 hours a day.