Ok I'm making a MMORPG and I'd like to know the best why to host the server appication and the website. I plan to post it on Gamedev when I'm done. So I think it should have a good amount of flow, what would be my best option? the most I would be willing to spend is around $100 /mo and I reallly what a trusted service... You know name brand stuff.

Can you give us a hint on what your version of "massive" is? Hard to give any suggestions without a player number/amount/load.

*insert you will fail message here*


Well, first off, an "MMORPG" is very vague, and the cost of hosting one can vary between a home dialup line, to renting out a massive 1000+ sever cluster with multiple redundant connections costing tens of thousands a month.


Before you can look into hosting something, you first have to look at what you will actually be hosting. Anaylize what your program will be doing, how much networking it will require (check for change in scale, just because you use X for 10 players, doesn't mean you'll be 10X for 100 players) and same goes for what the sever has to process.

After you have these figures in mind, you can start shopping around. Chances are the most you'll need is renting a server from a company (can be as little as $50 a month for a not too bad box these days) to host your game. You might be able to get your website on the same box, but I would suggest having your web and game servers on different boxes.

Just how many players do you envision being on the server at any given time?

I've never developed, or attempted to host a MMORPG before, but..

$100 a month is a very, very low budget for a dedicated server. Dedicated servers that cheap are primarily meant for medium traffic websites, not full blown game servers. Performance oriented dedicated servers with tons of bandwidth (we're talking terabytes here) will cost you several hundred dollars per month, if not more. Tag on the fact that you'll probably need to hire an experienced sysadmin to keep the system in tip-top shape, and it'll cost you much more than that.

If your server application(s) will only run on Windows, it will cost you extra to get a Windows-based server as well.

*reiterate you-will-fail message here*

I'm currently working on a distributed server farm setup for a non-massive (which for now I'm defining as <10,000 subscribers, <7,000 average concurrent connections) persistent online multiplayer game that will do a great deal of server-side processing with intermittent database hits (queued updates, independent of simulation).

As of now, we're going to need a minimum of six machines to support the above metrics, probably in a Blade setup, 64-bit quad-core processors with anywhere from 8-32GB to as-much-as-we-need, per server, of RAM. Storage space will only be an issue on the database server, and it's easy enough to RAID together a fast set of hard drives for a TB or two of storage. So, we're looking at five processor/RAM heavy servers for the login/primary server and four "satellite" servers off of the primary to do distributed processing (clustering already written and tested), plus one server with a large amount of HD space to access as needed, for the database, which may need expansion fairly quickly if we start approaching the player limit.

Of course, that's just one server cluster, realm, whatever you want to call it. One contiguous persistent world. We are planning on adding several.

We're looking at several professional level hosting services that specialize in MMOG hosting, including Online Game Services, Inc, among others, and will make that decision when it's time to start setting up some scale tests in preparation for alpha testing, though the first phase of that is likely to be on in-house machines.

All of this to say... are you sure you haven't bitten off more than you can chew? ;)

Ok let me explain every last detail of how my game works... this will be a very big post.

The client application receives data from the server appication though sockets that tells it what model, how to display the model and where to put the model. To send the data for each objects will probably be no more then 250 bytes and players will probably have less then 15 items on them so I'll say over all each player will require about 250 Kb/sec of bandwidth from the server.

The server application needs PhsyX to do all collision detection and has the cooked mesh data for each model that the client can display. It will be running scrips for each object, most will be simple scripts but some like the players will be more complex and will require a good amount of processing for scripts, physics and accessing the MySQL database.

I may end up writing my own physics engine because I planed on using procedurally generated planets becuase it would work better with my idea for the game and would not require a library like PhsyX to be installed on the server also thinking about looking into Newton.

As far as how many people will be playing your guess is as good as mine... If I post it on Gamedev how many people do you think would sign up for a mmorpg with graphics umm... VERY good graphics. I would post a screenshot but I don't like to show unfinished work it takes away the wow factor.

[Edited by - EmptyVoid on December 31, 2007 1:58:30 PM]

Quote:Original post by LmT
This is $50/mo over budget, but this might work: http://www.theplanet.com/dedicated-servers/default.asp?class=sm

You should look into testing your game small scale with a single player demo or with 5-10 friends on a temp server off of your comp or a friend's. If you're successful, it's time to move onto making it truly MMO. Good luck!

That looks like exactly what I'm looking for... but I'm not sure its exactly what I'm looking for lol. how does it work... does it have MySQL, PHP, IIS and what operating system? do they set it up for me like I give them the sever application and the files for the web site? Then they would have to set up the database...

Quote:Original post by EvanWeeks
*reiterate you-will-fail message here*

I'm currently working on a distributed server farm setup for a non-massive (which for now I'm defining as <10,000 subscribers, <7,000 average concurrent connections) persistent online multiplayer game that will do a great deal of server-side processing with intermittent database hits (queued updates, independent of simulation).

As of now, we're going to need a minimum of six machines to support the above metrics, probably in a Blade setup, 64-bit quad-core processors with anywhere from 8-32GB to as-much-as-we-need, per server, of RAM. Storage space will only be an issue on the database server, and it's easy enough to RAID together a fast set of hard drives for a TB or two of storage. So, we're looking at five processor/RAM heavy servers for the login/primary server and four "satellite" servers off of the primary to do distributed processing (clustering already written and tested), plus one server with a large amount of HD space to access as needed, for the database, which may need expansion fairly quickly if we start approaching the player limit.

Of course, that's just one server cluster, realm, whatever you want to call it. One contiguous persistent world. We are planning on adding several.

We're looking at several professional level hosting services that specialize in MMOG hosting, including Online Game Services, Inc, among others, and will make that decision when it's time to start setting up some scale tests in preparation for alpha testing, though the first phase of that is likely to be on in-house machines.

All of this to say... are you sure you haven't bitten off more than you can chew? ;)

the site looks good but again how would it get set up also the site does not tell how much it cost... at least I cant find it...