Server hosting

[Igiss]

I keep the Discovery FL server constantly online these days, but number of online players has significantly decreased. Hosting the server on my home PC may cause significant lag, and lag is probably the main reason why server activities declined. Correct me if I'm wrong. Number of people online has never exceeded 5 during the recent week, as far as I remember, and most of the time there are 2, 1, or 0 people online.

Hosting of the server on a dedicated machine, like 1-2 months before, is now impossible due to crashes. As my internet connection is not going to improve in the near future, I suppose the only possible solution for the Discovery server to survive is to be hosted by someone else.

What's actually required to host the server?

1) Hardware - the server will eat up 10-70% of CPU time depending on the number of players. However, according to my experience with Athlon 3000 (Socket-A), even with 10 people online you'll still be able to play Freelancer and other games or watch movies for example, it won't harm server performance alot. RAM - up to 100 Mb of free RAM is required.

2) PC should be on all the time or most of the day. You may restart it of course, but in peak hours I won't recommend restarting if it's not really needed.

3) Network connection. Bandwidth is not the most important thing, reliability is much more important. Ping is important too.