The Possibility Of Selling Anycast Services To Other Communities/Clients

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hello all,

 

I just wanted to talk about the possibility of selling services on our Anycast network. This includes any type of service including game servers as long as Compressor (developed by @Dreae) supports it. As of right now, there are no pricing estimates, but we're talking to a couple communities about this already. There is a possibility we'll make a deal with communities we are already talking to. However, this service won't be completely public for a while. Once/if it does go public, we'll have an entire website section dedicated to the service including the pricing, contacts, details, FAQs, etc.

 

As many of you know, the Anycast network has been a VERY big project for myself and @Dreae. I can easily say it is the biggest and most exciting project I've worked on in GFL thus far.

 

There are a few reasons we're considering this. The biggest reason is because GFL doesn't make enough money to support a great Anycast setup. Our budget is too low and due to this, we cannot purchase high-performance options from our hosting provider(s). If we start selling these services to other communities, we can potentially start putting in an extra hundreds of dollars (to thousands depending on how successful it is) a month into the network. My end-goal is to eventually have it so we can have either a very powerful VPS or a dedicated machine in every location. If it came down to it or was necessary, maybe even having a hardware firewall in-front of each PoP. This will allow us to extend Compressor's features along with being able to block larger (D)DoS attacks.

 

Please keep in mind this is the end-goal. With that said, I want this having a community-feel to it. This means I would encourage the other clients to give advice or help develop the network and we would be able to work together on this (e.g. learning how to block attacks or improving Compressor). The reasoning for this is because all the money that our 'clients' spend on this will go into network and GFL only. I along with any others will NOT be making any profit off of this service. I'm into this for the technical experience it gives me and having it advance my career in networking and programming (that has been my drive this entire time, anyways).

 

@Dreae is working on a control panel for Compressor. Keep in mind, this is a long time away, but it'll come in handy once this entire service does go public. It will allow clients to make very specific packet filtering rules for their IPv4 addresses only from the Anycast network.

 

We may also be able to sell dedicated machines to clients as well (we'd be a re-seller at this point). I might go as far as colocating dedicated machines (building them, shipping them to the data center, and having them ran by the data center). However, that is WAY down the line and I don't know if I'd want to do all of this without making any personal profit from it (I still have to work a full-time job outside of GFL, lol). However, as for buying machines from hosting providers and offering them to clients, I am fine with that. Might even be able to get our clients an Intel i9-9900K for $149.00/m, lol.

 

In the end, this is a WAYYYY in the future thing. Perhaps in the next six to twelve months depending on how things go. I'm sure there are a lot of other things I would need to change for this (e.g. our business license). I am going to be researching a lot on that and talking to some colleagues who are good at the business-side of things. 

 

I made a poll for any current service owners that may be interested in this.

 

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know!

 

More updates about this will be posted in the future.

 

Thanks!

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

I would also like to state if you're interested in hosting your server under GFL, you can talk to our Directors about it. That's also something we're going to be making public (although it has always been an option for people, secretly I guess).

 

Thanks!

[Weasel 0 / 308]

I came to this forum specifically because I was researching Anycast network solutions to create my own for my Rust servers and saw your postings.  As interesting of a learning exercise as this would be, I'd be more than happy to simply pay to benefit from your work.

 

Questions: 

 

1. Until your ASN is secured and you are dependent on Vultr, does this mean clients would have to host their game servers on Vultr as well?  
2. Forgive my limited knowledge of how BGP works, but once a client is routed to the nearest POP, are you then using DNAT to forward traffic back to the actual origin game server host, wherever it may be?  I'm trying to understand if this approach results in you guys paying transit costs from the POP to the actual game server, and if this limits my ability to do things like IP ban a player.

 

 

Edited December 17, 2019 by Weasel