Minecraft Servers

Post date: Dec 2, 2013 4:13:09 AM

Over the last two years I have been hosting my own minecraft server. This has been a physical machine that has lived in my house. I have used the server for a variety of different things (it is quite amazing how much you find you can run on a sever when you have one) but its main function has been to run a minecraft world. I have been running these servers in Ubuntu Server and not had any really trouble with software once I moved past the initial setup. However, I have found that there are a few downsides to running a server in your house:

• Maintaining the machine
• Increased internet usage
• Increased electric bill (not by much)
• Noise

These downsides eventually led me to stop running the server for the past few months. In particular, the internet usage has been a concern due to a 100 GB cap set by my ISP.

Recently I have started experimenting with creating a virtual private server using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud Service. I have found that a spot instance of linux works well and is quite reasonable (around $0.007 per hour at the moment). I will not go into details here on how to setup the server (although I intend to make a post about it). Based on the initial trial run, the small server seems to meet the needs of the group I am playing with.