Roy 10,832 / 0 Report Post Posted March 18, 2018 Hello, I just wanted to give an update regarding our OVH expansion in North America. I would like to note that I still need to talk to the Division Leaders about this but I would say we're most likely going with this plan. Our Initial Plan Initially, we planned on purchasing an OVH machine in the new data center located in the United States. This was specifically located in Vint Hill, Virginia. Recently, machines there became available with the discovery option. The only issue I had while purchasing the machine was PayPal not being a supported payment option and I'd highly prefer paying for these machines with PayPal. After contacting OVH's support about this issue, they told me PayPal would be added as a payment option. Though, they said this would be after the discovery period meaning the machines would be more expensive when we would be able to purchase the machine. I asked if we could still get the discovery price after PayPal is added and they told me more than likely no. Our New Plan OVH has another data center located in Montreal, Canada. Since this data center has been opened for a lot longer, there are a lot more machine configuration options to choose from and overall more cheaper and powerful. The reason we were trying to expand into the new data center (Vint Hill, Virginia) over the old data center (Montreal, Canada) is the location. Montreal is further north and in a less populated area in my opinion. However, we believe the difference wouldn't be much regarding the ping of the average user. @Xy_ did some math to prove this. Though, it all depends on where the user is located. There have been a lot of successful game servers hosted in the OVH data center located in Montreal, Canada. Due to how the Valve Master Server picks servers based on your geo-location, we've seen a lot of servers in this data center have their IPs geo-located to places like Chicago, US and so on. We plan on doing the same and I will be sending emails to geo-location companies. We would like to purchase a machine from OVH's Montreal data center. Read below. OVH Options OVH has machines configured for game servers in Montreal. You can look at the options here. We currently have one MC-32 machine located in Europe and it performs very well. The machine is $89.99/m which is very cheap, especially for the hardware it comes with. This machine, in my opinion is very powerful as well. I had planned to purchase another MC-32 machine for the Montreal data center. However, I continued to search for cheaper options. I soon remembered So You Start which is an (official?) OVH re-seller and supports the Montreal data center. SYS Options SYS also re-sells OVH machines configured to run game servers. You can look at the options here. We've used SYS in the past and it has been very successful to us. With that said, the prices on these SYS machines are insanely low in my opinion! In fact, the GAME-3 machine which is around $20.00/m cheaper than the MC-32 machine has 32 more GBs of ram along with the same processor and disk. Though, OVH has 2x480 GBs SSD in Soft Raid while the SYS machine has only 1x480 GBs SSD. But this won't matter much since we're performing automatic backups. At the start, the only thing stopping me from purchasing one of these machines was some questions regarding how IPs are handled and so on. With OVH, we could do these things but I just wanted to make sure we could with SYS. I called SYS's support number yesterday which I believe is basically OVH support and here is the questions and answers summed up. Q - If we were to buy an IP block, would we be able to gain ownership over the ARIN records with SYS IPs? This would allow us to change WhoIS info along with some geo-location data. A - Yes, for IP blocks of 4 and over. This works! I would be purchasing a block of eight IPs. Q - If SYS starts offering a new machine with more powerful hardware, would we be able to move our IPs over from an older machine to the new machine if we purchased it? We could do this with OVH. A - Yes, a time transfer (something I've done before with OVH) would be the best option and this is simple to do. This works as well! Q - If we decide SYS isn't the best option for us, would we be able to move our IPs to an OVH machine in Montreal? A - Yes, however, you cannot move IPs back to SYS from OVH. This is great and means we're basically covered. If we don't like SYS, we can move our IPs to a machine with OVH. Q - When will SYS start offering i7-7700K machines? A - We have no ETA on when we will but hopefully in the future. Not a big deal but having the Intel i7-7700K available would be nice! Q - When will the GAME-3 machines be replenished? A - Machines are replenished at the beginning of each week. There is also a system out there made by one of our customers that emails you when a machine type is replenished if you subscribe. This is also great and I will be purchasing the machine as soon as the machine is replenished! After that call, I became very confident that this is the machine we will order! With that said, I would like to note that if this machine does become overloaded, I believe we should look into ordering the GAME-1 machine. The single-thread performance of the Intel i7-4790K is similar to the Intel i7-6700K according to the benchmarks I've seen and single-thread performance is the most important for SRCDS servers in my opinion (Source Engine game serves). Although the disk space is low (120 GBs), we could still easily host 3 - 4 very popular servers on that machine (e.g. Garry's Mod RolePlay servers). Also, for that price ($34.30/m), it is literally a win-win. Conclusion I would like to purchase a game server machine from SYS as soon as the stocks are replenished. This should be tomorrow or Tuesday and after I talk to the Division Leaders. The machine will cost us $69.99/m and we will be able to handle a lot with it! After this machine is ordered and set up, we will start our expansion with Garry's Mod (RP servers to be specific) along with Left 4 Dead 1/2, Killing Floor 1/2, and Call of Duty 4. The Division Leaders are very confident and motivated to have this machine set up. They have been waiting for this for a long time now. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. Thank you for reading! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecoldsoldier 47 / 3,287 Report Post Posted March 18, 2018 · Hidden Hidden Nice shit Roy. If only my writing skills were as good as this. Share this post Link to post
Dreae 33 / 2,726 Report Post Posted March 18, 2018 · Hidden Hidden I'm curious if the GAME-3 is the most economical option, I was under the impression that srcds was CPU limited at higher player counts, I would think with 32 GB of RAM you would max the CPU before you ran out of RAM. Also worth noting that GAME-1 and GAME-2 are 30% off for as long as you keep the server if you order them now, the normal prices for them are $49.99 and $59.99 respectively. Share this post Link to post
Joshy 4,363 / 44,847 Report Post Posted March 18, 2018 · Hidden Hidden What does this mean for us? Will we be moving some of the servers we have? Will we be opening more or a new server? Is it all the same stuff at a lower cost or a change in performance? It's a lot of technical detail, but I'm not absorbing it as anything meaningful. Share this post Link to post
Eli 708 / 11,596 Report Post Posted March 18, 2018 · Hidden Hidden 15 minutes ago, Joshy said: What does this mean for us? Will we be moving some of the servers we have? Will we be opening more or a new server? Is it all the same stuff at a lower cost or a change in performance? It's a lot of technical detail, but I'm not absorbing it as anything meaningful. I’m pretty sure purge was talking about getting moved STEAM Share this post Link to post
Roy 10,832 / 0 Report Post Posted March 18, 2018 4 hours ago, Dreae said: I'm curious if the GAME-3 is the most economical option, I was under the impression that srcds was CPU limited at higher player counts, I would think with 32 GB of RAM you would max the CPU before you ran out of RAM. Also worth noting that GAME-1 and GAME-2 are 30% off for as long as you keep the server if you order them now, the normal prices for them are $49.99 and $59.99 respectively. SRCDS servers do not use much RAM and 32 GBs is more than enough in my opinion. The CPU would indeed be limited before running out of RAM. Now that I think of it, with the Intel i7-4790K and Intel i7-6700K having similar single-threaded performance according to the benchmarks I've seen, we could easily go with GAME-2 and still achieve around the same performance as the GAME-3 machine. I'm going to look around for other benchmarks. I wasn't aware that those first two machines were on sale. I apologize for not realizing that. I had a feeling $34.30/m for that machine was too good to be true! I will look further into it and possibly see if purchasing the GAME-2 machine would be best. Also, here's our RAM usage for one of our NFO machines running 19 online SRCDS servers: Please note the machine has 32 GBs of RAM total. Therefore, those 19 servers consume a total of 12 GBs of RAM total averagely. 4 hours ago, Joshy said: What does this mean for us? Will we be moving some of the servers we have? Will we be opening more or a new server? Is it all the same stuff at a lower cost or a change in performance? It's a lot of technical detail, but I'm not absorbing it as anything meaningful. Whether or not servers are moved from NFO to this machine is up to the Division Leaders. I believe the Garry's Mod DLs were looking into moving some dead servers from NFO to OVH to see if they would receive more population. When moving from NFO to OVH, the server's IP will change along with location. On a technical level, the operating system will most likely change from Windows to Linux unless if the server is hosted on our NFO VPS which is already running Linux. With that said, we are going to be opening new servers on this machine in Garry's Mod, Left 4 Dead 1/2, Killing Floor 1/2, and Call of Duty 4. Thanks. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joshy 4,363 / 44,847 Report Post Posted March 18, 2018 · Hidden Hidden Ah, that is super. I think this is known to have helped in the past. I'm assuming, when you say dead servers, TTT will be untouched. Would a linux machine have better performance? I thought it was generally more challenging for the leaders unless they are already familiar with linux; I was led to believe, that GMOD is a more difficult to server to faciliate or maintain, and I've noticed its instabilities as a player compared to the counter-strike servers. Share this post Link to post
annoying furry 6,300 / 63,935 Report Post Posted March 18, 2018 · Hidden Hidden 31 minutes ago, Joshy said: Would a linux machine have better performance? Should not be of noticeable difference from a windows machine, with the exception of CS:GO due to a bug. Linux servers are easier to debug and support ZFS, which saves us a HUGE amount of disk space. 2 hours ago, Dreae said: I'm curious if the GAME-3 is the most economical option tbh would go with GAME-3 solely on the fact that it has 480 GB of disk as opposed to 240. (signature made by @Kaylode) Previously known as Xy. Twitter ❤️Ko-Fi ❤️Github Share this post Link to post
Dreae 33 / 2,726 Report Post Posted March 18, 2018 Edited March 18, 2018 by Dreae · Hidden Hidden 1 hour ago, Roy said: I wasn't aware that those first two machines were on sale. I apologize for not realizing that. I had a feeling $34.30/m for that machine was too good to be true! They do state that the promotional price is valid for as long as you renew the server, so it's still a great price. I just don't know how long it will be available, I got the email about the promotion on Saturday, and since then they've already sold out on the GAME-1 servers. And to be fair even $59.99 a month for a 4790k and 32 GB of RAM is a great price, similar servers easily run you in the $80 - $100 a month range elsewhere. Even the OVH MC-32 is $89.99 per month, and as you say the 4790k and 6700k perform similarly (PassMark even has the 4790k out performing the 6700k) Edited March 18, 2018 by Dreae Share this post Link to post
Roy 10,832 / 0 Report Post Posted March 19, 2018 3 hours ago, Joshy said: Ah, that is super. I think this is known to have helped in the past. I'm assuming, when you say dead servers, TTT will be untouched. Would a linux machine have better performance? I thought it was generally more challenging for the leaders unless they are already familiar with linux; I was led to believe, that GMOD is a more difficult to server to faciliate or maintain, and I've noticed its instabilities as a player compared to the counter-strike servers. I haven't done any testing between Linux & Windows performance apart from CS:GO. In CS:GO, there is currently a networking thread limitation that I've reported on Valve's GitHub here. We don't plan on running any big CS:GO servers on this machine, though. Our CS:S servers ran completely fine on Linux and honestly, I'd prefer Linux due to the debugging we are able to do with crashes and so on. Unfortunately, I don't believe SRCDS provides Windows symbols for crash dumps and so on. As for Garry's Mod, I don't truly know if there is a difference between Windows and Linux regarding performance. The only difference with Linux (apart from being a different operating system) in Garry's Mod that I've noticed is each addon folder must be lower-case. Otherwise, it won't be loaded. This is a bug in Garry's Mod and I will probably report it sometime in the future. Though, it isn't a high priority as of now. We haven't hosted a very popular Garry's Mod server on Linux before, so this will be something new to us. I believe we will be fine. Other than that, our servers should be performing great with these future machines. Thanks. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
annoying furry 6,300 / 63,935 Report Post Posted March 19, 2018 · Hidden Hidden 1 hour ago, Roy said: This is a bug in Garry's Mod and I will probably report it sometime in the future. They know. Seems to be an issue with SRCDS. (signature made by @Kaylode) Previously known as Xy. Twitter ❤️Ko-Fi ❤️Github Share this post Link to post
Roy 10,832 / 0 Report Post Posted March 19, 2018 13 minutes ago, Xy_ said: They know. Seems to be an issue with SRCDS. If I remember correctly, Garry's Mod tries loading addons using all lower-case characters. This is fine on Windows because folders aren't case-sensitive. However, on Linux, folder names are case-sensitive. Therefore, if it tries to load "addons/testfolder" but the folder is actually "addons/TestFolder", it won't load. Not a big deal in my opinion, though. When I first experienced that issue, it did take me an hour to figure it out haha. Thanks. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roy 10,832 / 0 Report Post Posted March 23, 2018 An Update I tried ordering the GAME-3 machine on Monday but ran into a bug while ordering the machine. Currently, when trying to order a GAME-3 machine for Montreal, it displays as France on the order page. I called SYS support on Monday and they made a ticket stating they escalated the request to their web team. I haven't heard back from them since then. I replied back to the ticket today asking for an update and if it's possible to reserve a GAME-3 machine for us because I notice the machine running out of stock quite often. Initial ticket email: Quote Hello, This is Taylor from SoyouStart, we spoke earlier over the phone. I'm sending you this message as a follow-up to our conversation regarding problems purchasing a GAME-3 server located in Canada. As per our discussion, I have escalated this case to our web team, and we will contact you again as soon as we hear back from them in this matter. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and thank you for your patience in this matter. For any other questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us through a support ticket or through our toll-free line at 1-844-768-7827. We’re here 24/7 to help you! We thank you again for choosing SoyouStart, Taylor G. Customer Advocate My reply today: Quote Hey Taylor, I apologize for the delay. I was wondering if there were any updates regarding this ticket. I saw the machine available again a couple days ago but it displayed as France on the order page. Would there be a way to reserve a GAME-3 machine in the Montreal data center for me? Thank you for your time! I will reply back to this thread once I receive an update from them. Thank you. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roy 10,832 / 0 Report Post Posted April 2, 2018 Oh March 29th, I decided to purchase an OVH machine in Canada. Unfortunately, SYS has taken three weeks and still haven't restocked their GAME-3 machine for Canada. After exchanging emails addressing a bug along with asking when machines will be available, I've decided to just purchase an OVH machine due to SYS not knowing when stocks will be available. This is very unfortunate since the SYS GAME-3 machine was $20.00/m cheaper and had an additional 32 GBs of RAM. I spent the following two - three days setting the new machine up (networking + firewall + machines + control panel). I want to thank @Xy_ for the help with the control panel and game server machine. We are currently working on implementing auto-updates into the control panel. Once this is done, we will set up L4D 1/2 and KF 1/2 servers along with starting our expansion into Garry's Mod, Rust, and other games. We will also be looking into how we can set up servers that need to run on Windows such as Red Orchestra 2 and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. I've already sent a request to one geo-location company about getting our OVH IPs (198.50.132.56/29) geo-located to Chicago, US. I've done this for MaxMind so far. I will look for more companies in the future. This can take up to a couple weeks depending on how long it takes MaxMind to respond. We will be posting an announcement about our expansion into Garry's Mod and other games soon. I just want to finish getting everything set up first. I just wanted to thank everyone for being so patient while we waited to order the machine along with setting it up. Thanks! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...