I have recently bought VPS server for my personal use. And I also have installed Teamspeak 3 server to it so I can use it with my friends. However, TS3 server uses almost none of CPU power and the bandwidth isn’t even close to the limit, so why not make it public?

• Free to use
• 32 Slots
• Low latency (Eu server, uk)
• You can create private channels with passwords
• Stable connection and system. (I haven’t lost connection never, even with 8hour long connection and server has over 25d uptime so far)
• IP: 109.169.27.109
• Port: 9987 (default)

Servers page is here: vps.pelikoira.net

And direct link to the Teamspeak server.

Game-servers costs lot of money. If you want example good TF2 server with 24 slots, it can easily cost 24e per month. And for a year its about 288e! Thats lot… If you have clan and you split the cost, it can be lower. But mostly the servers aren’t very cheap for long run.

One way to get servers for cheap is to host them by yourself. You can host it at home, but you need to have machine running all the time, and most of the consumer connections aren’t good for hosting games. Another good option is to host the server on a VPS.

You can easily get a VPS server for 10$ month with 512 meg ram. And on that you can easily run two-three 24 player servers. If you would buy the servers from regular provider it would cost almost 100$.

I found one 5£ vps for 1£, so I bought it. If it is that bad, atleast I trying out it didn’t cost much. The server specs are following:

• 128 Meg ram
• 128 Meg swap
• Intel Q6600 (quad core) @2.4ghz (But the vps has only one core)
• 5 gig of storage
• Debian 5

When running source dedicated servers, the cpu usually isn’t the problem. I think that you can run a tf2 server with 1ghz processor without problems. The main problem with low end servers is the RAM. Second is the storage. 5 gig storage is the minimum as the tf2 cache size is already over 4gigs.

The 128meg ram is a bit low for the server, because the server software uses 250megs of ram on my home server. But 128m + 128m = 256m so it should work!

So far the server have run without any kind of problems. Ram usage is at 103meg and swap is at 70megs. I haven’t got any loss and choke have been always under 10. Usually 0-10 choke. Ping is good 50-70 to europe. And the cpu usage is always under 10%.

I had one 6v6 tf2lobby match on this server, and nobody whined about lag. Only problem that I have found is that the server is somehow slow to change maps because of the swap usage. But the game itself didn’t lag at all.

So, you can get cheap server for 5$ a month with 24 player slots. Just make sure that you get good connection and that the cpu isn’t overloaded. I would recommend to have 250+ megs of ram. But you can go with 128m and 128meg ram. Just make sure that you have 250megs or more of ram and swap.

My tf2 server is located at: 94.76.194.11:27015 And it may or may not be up.

I have recently tried the Amazon EC2 service. If you don’t know what EC2 is, read this.

Prize of instance isn’t very high. If you need to run couple of heavy apps for couple of hours, it costs maybe couple of dollars. But for hosting website it is very expensive. So if you need powerful machine for quick tasks, try EC2. If you need hosting, try vps/shared hosting.

If you try EC2 I really recommend to try Elasticfox Firefox addon, because it makes managing of EC2 much easier. I also recommend to read the documentations well before booting instances. Connecting to EC2 instance via ssh is done with private-keys. This was first time I used private keys with ssh, so I first forgot to include the key when I booted my first instance.

I got my second instance running without problems and I got ssh access to root shell. After some modifications to source.list file I was able to install irssi and htop. It seems like there isn’t any limitations on ports etc.

htop running on ec2

What I will try next on EC2 is game server. As these are very powerful servers, it would be great to just boot instance with game server pre-installed and then stop it when it isn’t needed anymore. Also, a large EC2 instance would be nice render node for 3d rendering.

I may move static files of this blog to S3, but I am not sure if that speeds up my blog…

Edit: I found official management console of AWS and it looks pretty nice. Try it before Ellasticfox.