How much do you consider to be cheap? I would personally recommend going with your own small VPS so you're in full control, they can easily be had for $10/month which is what most people here charge. Otherwise if you want to go with someone here contact AllNaturalX in IRC (#minecraft on irc.esper.net)
Assuming you're going after your own VPS, you'll probably need to learn a bit, but it's great fun. There are a huge array of different hosting companys to choose from, because of how minecraft works you probably don't need to consider latency that much - however when we get multiplayer survival it might be a different story - so your options aren't really limited by your location.
I would personally recommend you consider http://slidehost.com or http://linode.com or http://vps.net, they're very easy to work with and if you do mess up you can rebuild the server from the ground up with the click of a button. They are however slightly out of your price range - around $20 a month - so you might want to consider a cheaper company, however the quality is directly related to the price you pay.
Minecraft servers require very little resources though, so a 256MB VPS would work perfectly, I ran 16 servers off of a server with 2GB of ram. Something to not about how the servers work though is that the minecraft master server will only accept 4 servers per IP address, so you can't run more than 4 public servers per IP address.
If I've missed anything, I can go back over it. I think I covered everything, there's a tutorial I wrote here that covers how to do it, but you'll need to download java from the official site (http://java.com).
Alright, I've bought a VPS, set it up and I'm connected with putty. I'm following your guide and I'm up to: "wget http://minecraftservers.com/java.bin" but it appears the link is down. Any alternative links you can suggest?
Nevermind, I managed to figure the whole lot out myself. It's up and running. Thanks again. :smile.gif:
Sorry for the double post but didn't want too many edits in the one above.
One thing I would really like to know is an efficient way of automated backups for my maps. I'd prefer they are automatically downloaded onto my machine every x amount of minutes but remotely stored backups are fine too.
There are a variety of methods you can use, the most popular is to use a script like cmss (You'll have to search here for it, I don't remember the link). You could also go with using a cron that automatically copies server_level.dat to a new location and adds the time to the name or similar. There are a variety of ways, the simplest is the cron: http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbi ... ron-1.html
Great news about getting it all online. Who did you go with for your VPS in the end? :smile.gif:
If you can provide this in a reliable service, I'd be interested in negotiating a price.
Thanks :smile.gif:
Care to point me in the right direction from here?
Thanks.
I would personally recommend you consider http://slidehost.com or http://linode.com or http://vps.net, they're very easy to work with and if you do mess up you can rebuild the server from the ground up with the click of a button. They are however slightly out of your price range - around $20 a month - so you might want to consider a cheaper company, however the quality is directly related to the price you pay.
Minecraft servers require very little resources though, so a 256MB VPS would work perfectly, I ran 16 servers off of a server with 2GB of ram. Something to not about how the servers work though is that the minecraft master server will only accept 4 servers per IP address, so you can't run more than 4 public servers per IP address.
If I've missed anything, I can go back over it. I think I covered everything, there's a tutorial I wrote here that covers how to do it, but you'll need to download java from the official site (http://java.com).
Apologies if I typoed, I'm at college.
I'm gonna go weigh up my options, and I'll come back to this topic if I have any more questions or problems.
Nevermind, I managed to figure the whole lot out myself. It's up and running. Thanks again. :smile.gif:
One thing I would really like to know is an efficient way of automated backups for my maps. I'd prefer they are automatically downloaded onto my machine every x amount of minutes but remotely stored backups are fine too.
Can anyone help me with this?
Great news about getting it all online. Who did you go with for your VPS in the end? :smile.gif:
Can't afford electricity bills.
Brodband limit.
Noisey computer.
Crap computer.
Etc..