mini-update [1-15-17]Possibly Downgrading Europe Machine + Financial State

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hello, this is not a "weekly update post". However, I did want to address a couple things. Let's begin!

 

Possibly Downgrade Our Europe Machine To A "VDS" (VPS)

As a few of you already know, we currently have one dedicated machine from NFO in Europe. We have the 1271v3 package and it is currently costing us $180.00/m. The problem we are facing at the moment is the machine being highly under-loaded. Here are graphs of the server CPU usage and player counts:

 

As you can see, we are hitting an average of 30 - 40% max CPU daily on this machine. Our other machines (US) are hitting around 50 - 60% max CPU daily. Normally, we would try to put more load onto the machine by expanding into more games/game-modes. However, since we are trying to move off of NFO (to OVH) and this would be one of the first machines we would try to move over, we would prefer not to setup any new servers on this machine.

 

The only time this machine was actually considered "loaded" or higher this past month was when the Valve MM servers were down in CS:GO (a very rare occurrence).

 

With that said, if we do downgrade to a VDS, server performance will also be downgraded. Though, our servers aren't normally maxing out daily. Therefore, I don't really see our servers struggling for resources. I will admit, if another "rare event" happens where we receive a sudden spike of players, we will NOT be prepared (a VDS wouldn't be able to handle anything above 24 - 32 players depending on the server's tick-rate). Due to the CS:GO Linux limitation (which, the Valve developers STILL haven't fixed), we will need to unfortunately install Windows on this VDS (will also cost us extra money for a Windows license). As of right now, I believe we will do okay on a four-core VDS ($31.99/m + $14.99/m for the Windows license). We can always upgrade to a higher core count if our VDS struggles for resources.

 

Overall, our European machine isn't due until the 30th. If we have our new back-end system done by then, we may be able to simply switch over to OVH (probably purchase a temporary VDS for another month to slowly move servers over). If our OVH back-end isn't done by then, we may be downgrading to a VPS until the OVH back-end is done. This will save us $133.02/m ($180.00 - $46.98). In the end, the VDS option is definitely going to be temporary.

 

Now for the pros and cons:

 

Stay On A Dedicated Machine

Pros

• Better performance.
• [Unlikely] Expand into more games/game-modes (until we try to move to OVH...)

 

Cons

• Spending $180.00/m (extra $133.02/m compared to the VDS).
• Going to be soon getting rid of it anyhow once we move to OVH.

 

Move To A VDS

Pros

• Much cheaper.
• Easy to upgrade core counts (for more resources).

 

Cons

• Worse performance due to virtualization and lower clock speeds depending on the (random) processor we get put on (remember, the Source Engine is mostly single-threaded).
• Can be impacted by other customers (this is something that has bothered me a lot with NFO VDSs).

 

Financial State

I've discussed our financial state in the past and I've always said how unhappy I was with it. However, it is different this time. We have reached over $2000.00 as our balance and I am very happy with that. With that said, we have $387.72 coming in on the 21st from MOTDgd Ad money. Ever since we did a Supporters/VIPs sale, we've been receiving many more donations (thank you, @Syrus for the idea). We are looking forward to doing many other sales in the future!

 

We are also continuing to cut down on expenses (e.g. the "European machine" discussed above). If we keep it up, we feel purchasing our OVH machines and perhaps other (temporary) VDSs will be less of a risk to take. We also plan to raise our monthly goal to $1500.00 (keeping our balance over $1500.00 at all times is what we consider "stable").

 

I will discuss more specific details about what we're going to be spending money on in future update threads. You can take a look at this Google Sheet that lists our current expenses.

 

Finally, we just wanted to say a big thank you to our Supporters/VIPs who have donated money towards GFL! Without you, GFL wouldn't be alive. As stated in the past, all donations in GFL go into the community (nobody makes profit off of GFL). We will continue to improve GFL and try our best to make our Supporters/VIPs (along with players, etc) happy.

 

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reply!

 

Thanks for reading!

[syrus 1,000 / 15,155]

2017... Good things are coming, good things are going to happen.

[Rcool64 1,007 / 16,299]

2 minutes ago, Syrus said:

2017... Good things are coming, good things are going to happen.

SYRUS DON'T JINX OUR PERFECT YEAR

[syrus 1,000 / 15,155]

5 minutes ago, Rcool64 said:

SYRUS DON'T JINX OUR PERFECT YEAR

2017... Bad things are coming, bad things are going to happen.  

[Chormee 2,973 / 29,227]

Wait now @Syrus said it will be good and bad...So he jinxed both. It's gonna be an average year now. Unless I'm jinxing that...This is confusing

[Hello. 1,452 / 24,189]

Could also expand on Syrus's idea a bit:

 

Do a wholesale bargain. For example: 10 VIPs for $70, or something along the lines of that nature.

Edited January 16, 2017 by PB-n-J

[Moca 59 / 3,858]

1 hour ago, PB-n-J said:

Could also expand on Syrus's idea a bit:

 

Do a wholesale bargain. For example: 10 VIPs for $70, or something along the lines of that nature.

Or bring back perma for around $85 for just a month!

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

14 minutes ago, JerryHatTrick said:

Here is my gripe, and I hope it can be resolved easily;

 

I have permanent VIP, which means I never have to donate to GFL again.

However, I want to donate from time to time,  because I'm a firm believer in supporting the servers you play on.

The problem is, if I donate using the current system, I have my status changed (just recently to "Supporter"), and when that expires, I lose my VIP status & have to ask for it to be restored. Others also seem to have this issue.

If there is an alternative method, I may be missing it. But it's a concern, for me anyway.

I believe @denros is looking into this issue sometime this week. The system currently doesn't check if the user is a higher rank. Therefore, if you purchase Supporter as a VIP, your rank will be overwritten.

 

This will be changed hopefully soon!

 

Thanks for the support!

[Argyros 35 / 2,141]

@Roy
You can save money by using your own Windows Server License on OVH.

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

On 1/17/2017 at 8:18 PM, Argyros said:

@Roy
You can save money by using your own Windows Server License on OVH.

I'm not sure what you mean. We aren't planning to use Windows for OVH (only NFO). If we got an NFO VDS, since it would have to be managed (in-order for the server IPs to stay, etc), we wouldn't be able to use our own Windows license, etc.

 

Also, I purchased the OVH GameServer machine ($80.00/m) and eight IPs for our game servers and such ($24.00) yesterday. Since it will take a while to setup, I decided to purchase it now and set it up along with perform many tests.

 

Thanks!

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

I have decided to go with moving our servers to a NFO VDS.

 

Recently, we have only been hitting around 30% peak CPU daily. I felt temporarily purchasing a NFO VDS until we move to OVH would be the best option (this would also save us money as well).

 

Thanks.

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

After monitoring performance for the past few days on our VDS, I've made the decision to just keep our dedicated machine and cancel our VDS. I am currently moving servers from the VDS back to the machine.

 

I was on Surf RPG DM (EU) two days ago and noticed constant lag spikes (this was the exact issue we had in the past with NFO VDSs). As I said in another update, I asked NFO to move us to a more powerful VDS but that hasn't helped performance much. If we were to keep the VDS, we would have to upgrade the core count regardless (we would easily reach 100% overall CPU at this rate with four cores).

 

Hopefully we will not have to keep this machine after this month since we should have moved to OVH by then.

 

Thanks.