Players: Would you be interested in contributing to a game server payments?

[Tvorsk]

This is not a topic officially approved by Virmir. I'm just curious.

(Inspired by talk in chat yesterday)

Do you think that the idea of some of us raising together money for a second Linode that would act as a game server is feasible?

A Linode 512 is $19.95 per month. It can easily handle a few instances of a TF2 server, and from what I heard around should lift up the memory hog that is Minecraft server too. Quite possibly both of these together, and maybe even more stuff you'd want/need, tho we'd have to try to know for sure.
It offers a good reliable service on a high-performance machine with guaraneed slice of processing power available, and a professional datacenter Phat Pipe two hops from main backbone. Sure that should stop your complaints about lag on Virmir's narrow-upload DSL?

Now think about it... if ten people would be interested, it's $2 per month for each of them. If five, well, it's still "only" $4. Of course, if soemone'd want to contribute more, or pay $12 for three(six?) months up front so there's no "paypal fee larger than what I send" ridiculousness, it all sure could be arranged... but that's a song for later.

For now, keeping in mind that we would HAVE to have these twenty bucks ready each month, no ifs or buts, would you be interested in such a project, and could you afford to contribute? If so, how much at most?

Not making it a poll, because I don't want to see 20 anonymous YES votes then no one standing up to them... no offense meant >.>;

[Dragyn]

Interested, yes, but I'd have to say no, anyway, for the same reason I don't play games with subscription fees.  Can't afford it, and don't generally play things enough to justify it.

So yeah, it sounds cool, and I'd use it if it were there, but I couldn't really justify paying for it at this juncture.

[Virmir]

I would be interested, and would pay my part. (This topic is now officially approved. )

I've been watching the memory requirements for the Minecraft server, and the thing has been hitting over 500MB with five people on it, and that number's been growing a bit every day.  So yeah, it does increase with the size of the world, and I'd expect that to grow more fairly quickly since it's only been up less than a week.  I think it loads what has been visited during the current session, rather than the entire map at once, since on a restart the memory requirements will go down quite a ways and then slowly crawl up.  So a 512 Linode would probably run into issues... (Then again, hosted on my DSL lags with more than three people, so take your pick. )

[Tvorsk]

We can swap it a bit, for first, assuming it doesn't actually "touch" the un-visited parts of the world when no one's there. Also, scheduling a daily or weekly reboot isn't much of a problem.

[Fen]

I can chuck in a couple bucks a month, assuming I can pay via paypal. $5USD, I'd say.