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23-08-2013, 12:42 PM
Hi,
as you will have noticed, the new servers are certainly not working as expected, at least individually. The great advantage, however, is that the servers are completely isolated. If one box goes down, it doesn't affect the other servers. Also each box, and hence each server, does have an IP of its own.
On the other hand, with our old single root server, things were insanely stable. I only had to restart the machine itself like once or twice a year and except for some unfortunate incidents all servers used to be up and running rather smooth, each having an uptime of at least 20-30 days usually.
Now the big question is, what do you guys prefer?
Do you want us to stick to these new servers?
Do you want to go back to a single dedicated server (that will not suffer from problems that occur in shared environments, i.e. HDD lags) ?
Do you want to just run this a little longer and see if all the current issues can be sorted out?
This is by no means a decisive poll, I may or may not stick to what you guys vote for. It's just a survey for me to get an idea about this.
Please everybody give your vote.
Thanks.
-- Ligustah
Update:
As a significant number of people asked for, here is a little list of advantages and problems of each of the architectures. I may add more to the lists as I come up with more items.
First of all, because I was also asked for, I'd like to mention some of the reasons that made me switch servers in the first place:
Since we used to have the old machine for quite some time now (like 2 or 3 years), it had become quite cost inefficient, meaning the monthly fee didn't provide us with the amount of resources that were available at similar rates these days, so I would have needed to cancel the current contract anyways to move to a newer and bigger machine.
So that was about when our hoster started that new plan, that allows me to purchase a certain number of 'credits' and then arbitrarily spend them on resources for virtual servers. Resource-wise the calculation does indeed look pretty nice, since for the same money we could get like 10 small virtual servers, with about twice as many resources combined as our old machine used to have.
So, in theory the virtual servers should be superior for their increased fault tolerance and their lower resource price.
Pro single dedicated:
Pro multiple virtual:
I will probably add more to both lists soon.
as you will have noticed, the new servers are certainly not working as expected, at least individually. The great advantage, however, is that the servers are completely isolated. If one box goes down, it doesn't affect the other servers. Also each box, and hence each server, does have an IP of its own.
On the other hand, with our old single root server, things were insanely stable. I only had to restart the machine itself like once or twice a year and except for some unfortunate incidents all servers used to be up and running rather smooth, each having an uptime of at least 20-30 days usually.
Now the big question is, what do you guys prefer?
Do you want us to stick to these new servers?
Do you want to go back to a single dedicated server (that will not suffer from problems that occur in shared environments, i.e. HDD lags) ?
Do you want to just run this a little longer and see if all the current issues can be sorted out?
This is by no means a decisive poll, I may or may not stick to what you guys vote for. It's just a survey for me to get an idea about this.
Please everybody give your vote.
Thanks.
-- Ligustah
Update:
As a significant number of people asked for, here is a little list of advantages and problems of each of the architectures. I may add more to the lists as I come up with more items.
First of all, because I was also asked for, I'd like to mention some of the reasons that made me switch servers in the first place:
Since we used to have the old machine for quite some time now (like 2 or 3 years), it had become quite cost inefficient, meaning the monthly fee didn't provide us with the amount of resources that were available at similar rates these days, so I would have needed to cancel the current contract anyways to move to a newer and bigger machine.
So that was about when our hoster started that new plan, that allows me to purchase a certain number of 'credits' and then arbitrarily spend them on resources for virtual servers. Resource-wise the calculation does indeed look pretty nice, since for the same money we could get like 10 small virtual servers, with about twice as many resources combined as our old machine used to have.
So, in theory the virtual servers should be superior for their increased fault tolerance and their lower resource price.
Pro single dedicated:
- No resource sharing with other customers
- More efficient resource usage (KSM)
- Significantly better disk performance
- If it's working, it's going to work well
Pro multiple virtual:
- Individual server crashes do not affect other servers
- Individual IP addresses => handy domain names to connect with (nd.twcclan.org, tj.twcclan.org, etc)
- Easier server upgrades (it's kinda hard to upgrade a single dedicated machine with new software, because I have to take down all servers to do that)
- Increased security (mostly because of the isolation)
- Virtual servers are billed by the hour, this means we could set up certain servers and keep them running for a weekend (e.g. fun weekend) and just throw them away afterwards, only actually paying for those few days or try completely new games
- Virtual servers can be cloned so I can test certain modifications before actually applying them to the live systems
I will probably add more to both lists soon.
I'm quite busy, so unless it's a quick thing or really urgent I am unlikely to be able to answer PMs throughout the week, but I try to reach out to everyone who contacted me during the weekends. If it's urgent, you can also contact any of the supremes, they can do a lot of things or relay directly to me if necessary.
