[turtle]

Originally Posted by Brad Dang. Sorry to hear that! Minecraft server aside, I seem to recall that you've been hosting so much other personal stuff from your home network. I can only begin to imagine how stressful that will be to sort out. I've had Google Fiber in my home for the last few years, and whenever I hear news about their Fiber division, it's almost always a rumor about its inevitable demise, and my anxiety ramps right up. My next "best" options are Spectrum and AT&T, and unsurprisingly they are both much more expensive for much worse service.

You are one of the few who likely understands my true pain. It has been rough and I do host a bunch of services from my network. I run static IPs and use those to access specific work related resources as well. Going to wireless or even Starlink would kill the ability to even have an external IP in most cases. Routing traffic back to my network for hosting services would not happen. The list for me really does go on and on.

As for the Minecraft server, I could trim the world and bring it back over to the main AppleNova server here. I'd need to enable the world border setting since I don't have unlimited disk space, but like you said, there's not a lot of activity lately, and I'm pretty sure this server could handle the load. (More on that below, though…) As much fun as our little gaming community has been, though, I do believe its glory days are firmly behind us, several years behind us in fact. I would be bittersweet to say goodbye, of course, but maybe it's a happy ending for the server go quietly in the night while nobody is watching.

This has crossed my mind a number of times. I don't mind hosting the server at all and even kinda enjoy it. I have been tracking the access to the server via my Zabbix monitoring server and the "mcstatus" app running on the anmc server. We have had little traffic overall for more than the year it has been logged.

Our max was three at one time near New Years Eve and normally one person coming and going here and there. The graph makes it really easy to see.

Yeah, there have been dedicated Minecraft server hosts for the better part of a decade. I believe it's a pretty mature market now, but the last time I looked around (never seriously, just out of curiosity), most of them (certainly not the cheap ones) didn't allow the freedom to basically run with root access and do anything like we've had with T's server (and previously mine on AppleNova). AWS gets expensive pretty fast, especially considering how little time we spend in game, at least compared to the dedicated Minecraft hosting services. The baseline EC2 type we'd want would probably be t4g.medium (2 CPU cores, 4 GB RAM) which would run $25/month plus disk storage costs. To compare, dedicated Minecraft hosts with roughly equivalent resources run around $10/month. Do we have enough interest to sink ~$150-300/year on Minecraft? Probably not. I think my last login was around the December/New Years holiday break, and I've doubtless sunk countless hundreds of hours into our worlds over the years. I currently pay $30/month for the server that runs AppleNova. It also hosts a few other personal projects of mine, and it's still somewhat idle. Linode just announced their first price increase in the whole 15+ years that I've been a customer ("Created: 2008-02-11"). Previously, as hardware got cheaper, every few years they'd actually give existing plans more resources for the same price point. I guess selling out to Akamai means someone took on a fat wad of debt, and now daddy's gotta get paid. Anyway, soon it'll be $36/month, and I'll probably opt down to the next lower tier at $24/month (I'd already been thinking about dropping from $30 to $20, and this rate increase may push me over). The current tier has 3 CPU cores (of a 2.2 GHz AMD EPYC 7601) and 6 GB RAM. The $24/month tier has 2 CPU cores and 4 GB RAM. That would be pretty slim for the forums, database, my personal projects, and Minecraft. It could probably muster a couple people online, but certainly not the 10+ we had when business was booming a decade ago. Huh. Actually, now that I do the math, it might be more economical for me to move all of AppleNova into AWS. That certainly wasn't always the case. One of the problems with running AppleNova in AWS EC2, though, is that EC2 blocks normal sendmail activity. That means the forums sending automated emails (subscribed thread updates, PM notifications, password resets) would be difficult or impossible to configure. But I digress…

Most web services suck. Azure and AWS are brutal to the wallet. I would recommend looking at DigitalOcean if you are considering moving. I'm sure the AN server would actually fit in one of the $10/m droplets. If not I'm sure you would still end up better off than if you went with "traditional" hosting.

T, I'll try to keep a close eye on this thread for your updates in the coming days and weeks. I'm long overdue for downloading a backup from your server; I'll update my local copy this weekend. As we approach end of service, I think it makes sense to coordinate a proper shutdown of the game server, at least in its current state. Maybe we can rally the troops for one last hurrah before the end? If we don't migrate to a new server, I'm thinking it would only be fair to (…drum roll please…) finally share a downloadable backup of the current world for Drew, Grey, Ken, and anyone else who's still lurking to enjoy exploring on their personal machines. I could upload it to a free junk file hosting site like MEGA since serving god-only-knows how many GBs from AppleNova might be a tall order.

I spent the better part of today on the phone with AT&T. It has been painful and frustrating to say the least. Of all the conflicting information I've been given the common theme is that I likely won't lose my VDSL in a month but I might gain fiber as an option in the next couple of weeks. I don't believe that in the least... but I am glad to hear that I might not actually lose my ISP as it is. For the other parts of my call, I've been contacting AT&T because my internet connection is horrible today. Coming and going with absurd latency hit or mis. It has just been brutal.

Yesterday I contacted Spectrum who is our local cable provider. They do not currently offer services for my "neighborhood" (in the sticks) but do for a new one a stone's throw away. They are now going to come out and do a survey to looks at replying services to our neighborhood! In the next "one to two weeks" I should hear from a Spectrum rep on the expansion into our area to get me service. I would assume if they do expand it would be fiber. Of course, this is all still a pipe dream until I have a new cable connected to my building.

If we do make the world available for download we will figure out a way to get them somewhere public. I think I still have the world files from all the previous builds too, like my old favorite of Bridgeport.