The transition has happened. We have migrated from running multiple game servers on multiple gaming hosts, to one gaming host to a dedicated system. Currently we are hosting 4 game servers and TeamSpeak3 from a dedicated server. Likely, later this year, we will also move this website to that same system, as well.

The system is an HP Proliant DL360 G5. Its a bit dated but is readily available as are parts. The system is plenty powerful to run what we are currently running without issue. The one bottleneck we have, and can’t be avoided, is network bandwidth. I only have a 25Mbp/s connection on this server; that’s a balanced connection with 25 download and 25 upload. If it becomes to be too much of a pain, I don’t mind moving some stuff back to hosted solutions, but donations would have to support the costs associated with those subscription fees.

So, what kind of hardware are talking about here? The DL360 G5 carries dual CPUs. Both are quad-core Xeon 3.0Ghz processors. 16GB of DDR2 RAM. Dual 1G NICs in a teamed pair. Dual PSUs for redundancy. Dual 300GB, 15k, 6G, Dual Port SAS hard drives ran from a Battery Backed Write Cache RAID controller. I have them configured in a simple mirror for data safety and redundancy. I considered adding another disk array in a striped set for performance, but then we would lack redundancy… so, we’ll hold off on that until its needed. Disk is not our bottleneck right now. And, to round things out, the system is plugged into a UPS which in the event of a power failure will gracefully shut the server down to avoid data loss or corruption. On top of all of this is the latest Windows server operating system: Windows Server 2012 R2.

Some future work I have planned is some scheduled tasks that auto restart some of the game servers to mimic the restart features that the game hosting companies provide. Also, I’d like to schedule and automate some backups so that in the event a game database or “world” file becomes corrupt we can revert to a previous state known to be good.

If anyone has any suggestions, comments or questions, feel free to post in the forums and I will try and reply in a speedy fashion.