[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[Daniel James]

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, Amanda Walker wrote:

> On Mar 7, 2007, at 2:12 PM, Adam Martin wrote:
> 
> Baseline assumptions:
> - Use BitTorrent, sourceforge, googlepages, or some other free file hosting
> service to host client downloads.  No cost there, pretty reliable.  $0.

I wouldn't do this. I would use Amazon's S3 or some other pay-by-the-GB 
solution. Bittorrent is nice to support but you can't rely on it. Even 
if you have to host your own ~40mb downloads, as we have, costs are not 
super material until you get 10,000's a day. Umm, assuming you're making 
some money back on the other side, of course.

> - Let's say 2000 clients per server, and disregard for the moment whether
> that's sharded vs. a single load balanced simulation.

This is about spot on for Puzzle Pirates.

> - Say half a rack per data center: 6 servers, Ethernet switch(es), router, a
> couple upstream bandwidth providers (in case one has bad internet weather).
> - Start with, say 3 data centers; say, SF, DC, and Chicago.  Since we're an
> indie, using data centers with "smart hands" service means you don't have to
> travel as much to deal with stupid hardware problems.

Why on earth would you start with 3 data centers? We've never used more 
than one apart from during transition. Multiple data centers is a huge 
pain. Latency is not really an issue, at least for PP, and if it were it 
would only be transatlantic or perhaps transpacific. We just rolled out 
our German server and it happily delivers good Euro experience from colo 
here in SF.

> 3 data centers x 6 servers per data center = 18 servers, figure we go midrange
> for about $2500 each.  That's $45K upfront capex (though you could start
> smaller if you don't expect tens of thousands of users).

For an Indie MMO I can't imagine needing to support 18 x 2,000 = 36,000 
simultaneous users out of the gate. We run PP with one production server 
for more than a year. That said, we would have *liked* to have needed 
more.

> A half-rack of space, power, and a few megabits of bandwidth will 
> probably be about $1K/month, x 3 = $3K/mo opex.

So, yeah, $1k/mo. Very practical for someone with a lucrative day-job!

> I suspect that the future of indie MMO hosting is not in Moore's Law 
> as applied to server prices, as impressive as that is, but in things 
> like Amazon EC2, where you can buy both computing power and bandwidth 
> in much smaller incremements based on demand:

I agree with this. OGSI's 'Darth Vadar's Bathroom' solution is 
similarly appealing if you are not sure about your scaling requirements.

> OGSI, if their website is accurate, is hardly funded by spare cash :-)

Indeed, they are very well capitalised! FYI We use OGSI for our hosting, 
although we currently buy our own (small) iron -- I think we're up to 
~30+ production servers in colo. We just rented a cage. Ooooh. The 
annoying bit about buying your own iron is less the servers but more the 
switches and routers and associated pain and suffering. Fortunately we 
have some masochistic types on staff!

d