Last month I really wanted to figure out how the Minecraft server hosting companies can make money, and how there are so many of them.
Quickly I realized they did not host their own dedicated servers, in their own datacenter. This became an interesting problem, so if you are not hosting your own dedicated box’s then you must be renting them, essentially acting as a middleman. This is what happens to an extent. They do not rent out individual dedicated servers and re-sell them as dedicated servers.
Here is where VPS comes in. After a bit of research almost EVERY Mincraft hosting company uses this system. Not knowing what VPS was, I automatically went to Wikipedia to find out. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. If you can not get what it is from there, it basically means there is one machine running multiple Virtual Machines, each running independently of each other. The problem here is shared resources. Since you can dedicate a CPU and some RAM to each VM, it will be much slower than a traditional dedicated. I do not like the idea of shared resources, even if it does it in a very good way, using a Hypervisor (use Wikipedia) like Xen, to manage it.
Then the question is of how can they make this money, just by renting and maintaining. So I began to look at two different kinds of hosts, cheap ones, and expensive ones. Using a few IP tools, I found out who hosted the servers they offer. Generally the cheaper hosts used OVH as their host, who tend to offer cheap servers, though I cannot speak on their reliability, this is who hosts us. A couple of more expensive hosts used SingleHop or other more expensive hosting companies. Generally they probably have better reliability and a better infrastructure.
So how do I choose a host? If you really want the best performance, it will cost you. It is best to have a dedicated server wherever possible. Obviously that is not the most cost effective… So you usually will have to choose a VPS host, checking out all the options and pricing can be the best. Sending emails to the company can also help, seeing how many servers are hosted on one box. Generally they wont do more than 5 since that is the amount of usable ip’s they get by default. Sometimes they will do more, just using different ports on the same IP. It also really depends on how many people the server is going to be hosting over a constant period of time, and how many plugins are loaded. It is a very hard mix to get right, but when it is it can be fantastic.