thunderclap
Youngster
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2013
- Messages
- 507
- Points
- 93
What does the PWO server currently cost? What kind of hardware is it? We were told a figure years ago of ~$330 per month on these forums, in the interests of transparency. I've looked and asked, but can't find any up-to-date figures.
That price, if still accurate, suggests that we're using one very high-end or multiple dedicated servers. Which would be total complete overkill for PWO.
Is there any reason PWO can't be hosted on a cheap VPS from someone like OVH or Leaseweb for example? Looking at their prices, I think the total costs to host PWO could be about $15-30 per month, quite reasonably. Certainly a tiny fraction of $330. The specs look quite good also. Should be easy to find an even better deal -- I didn't do any shopping around -- I just know these 2 companies are reputable.
The way a VPS works is we'd be sharing a server with other people, but each section has its own OS installed and behaves like a dedicated server, for all intents and purposes. Each segment is fully isolated from the other users for 100% security. If old server hardware was able to host PWO in its heyday years ago, I think new hardware should manage fine with our few dozen users even if we're sharing it.
I'm somewhat skeptical that we're currently using modern hardware, though, judging by the performance. Not saying this to insult or discourage but each Playerdex page takes quite a while to load, especially Global Link, and there's a lag whenever using bicycle in-game, or entering doors/stairs, etc. I'm sure that's partly due to big sprawling databases and inefficient coding, but does that explain it completely? It's not a huge deal, but we don't seem to be getting $330 worth of performance.
I suspect PWO owns an old legacy server (crusty yellowed Pentium 4 tower?) and pays to host it in someone's datacentre. I could see that being costly, and its continued use justified until now by the complexity/complacency in moving/upgrading servers. But in 2021, that's not at all worth it given the cheap alternatives. VPSes these days have blazing fast NVMe SSDs and a certain number of dedicated CPU cores per user.
Performance isn't my main concern -- if we can keep the same performance but cut the price to 1/20, I'd call that a huge game-changing win. But depending how old our current hardware is we might see a performance gain AND huge cost savings.
We all know that no staff member profits from donations and that any excess donations go to charity, but I hate to see donations being ill-spent on unnecessary costs, if that is happening.
The need to maintain so much donation income is hurting this game. Most importantly the decision not to have any source of free memberships other than random rare giveaways. If another source of memberships existed we might not see these long dry spells between events with only 10 players online. If server costs were $15 a month we wouldn't need the token store at all. PWO is developing an ugly stink of being Pay To Win and it is unfortunate. I'd personally like to remove the shiny chance from the token store altogether.
I think it's in the game's long-term interest to address this issue. @Bluerise
Thanks for reading and for your continued development/support of this game
.
That price, if still accurate, suggests that we're using one very high-end or multiple dedicated servers. Which would be total complete overkill for PWO.
Is there any reason PWO can't be hosted on a cheap VPS from someone like OVH or Leaseweb for example? Looking at their prices, I think the total costs to host PWO could be about $15-30 per month, quite reasonably. Certainly a tiny fraction of $330. The specs look quite good also. Should be easy to find an even better deal -- I didn't do any shopping around -- I just know these 2 companies are reputable.
The way a VPS works is we'd be sharing a server with other people, but each section has its own OS installed and behaves like a dedicated server, for all intents and purposes. Each segment is fully isolated from the other users for 100% security. If old server hardware was able to host PWO in its heyday years ago, I think new hardware should manage fine with our few dozen users even if we're sharing it.
I'm somewhat skeptical that we're currently using modern hardware, though, judging by the performance. Not saying this to insult or discourage but each Playerdex page takes quite a while to load, especially Global Link, and there's a lag whenever using bicycle in-game, or entering doors/stairs, etc. I'm sure that's partly due to big sprawling databases and inefficient coding, but does that explain it completely? It's not a huge deal, but we don't seem to be getting $330 worth of performance.
I suspect PWO owns an old legacy server (crusty yellowed Pentium 4 tower?) and pays to host it in someone's datacentre. I could see that being costly, and its continued use justified until now by the complexity/complacency in moving/upgrading servers. But in 2021, that's not at all worth it given the cheap alternatives. VPSes these days have blazing fast NVMe SSDs and a certain number of dedicated CPU cores per user.
Performance isn't my main concern -- if we can keep the same performance but cut the price to 1/20, I'd call that a huge game-changing win. But depending how old our current hardware is we might see a performance gain AND huge cost savings.
We all know that no staff member profits from donations and that any excess donations go to charity, but I hate to see donations being ill-spent on unnecessary costs, if that is happening.
The need to maintain so much donation income is hurting this game. Most importantly the decision not to have any source of free memberships other than random rare giveaways. If another source of memberships existed we might not see these long dry spells between events with only 10 players online. If server costs were $15 a month we wouldn't need the token store at all. PWO is developing an ugly stink of being Pay To Win and it is unfortunate. I'd personally like to remove the shiny chance from the token store altogether.
I think it's in the game's long-term interest to address this issue. @Bluerise
Thanks for reading and for your continued development/support of this game
.
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