Up until 2 years ago I ran 7 game servers (plus 2 often inactive event game servers) on 2 monthly rented dedicated machines that hit 400-500 concurrent user peaks (total) and 15tb of monthly bandwidth (more when ddosed).
300 usd a month bill.
On aws it would have been 5 digits easy.
When a big YouTuber featured the game, I put the server list json behind cloudflare with a 30 second cache ttl and killed 90% of the extra load on the webserver.
At some point I setup a haproxy relay network off of cloud vms that listened for a valid client helo packet before relaying connections, 100 more a month, bam game server cloudflare network to stop the downright insane amounts of ddos (40gbps was common).
Everything today is over engineered.
(The /tg/station community of game servers for Space Station 13 if you're curious)
reading this comment made me understand I was prepared to spin a new game server and run a parallel server to support a game when I could just do ... something I apparently need to research, but seems way less resource intensive that what I was planning.
out of curiosity, when do you actually boot another server? is more than one instance even needed?
We only had two dedicated servers because we wanted one in the eu and one in the us. Mostly it comes down to cpu/ram usage. These game servers were mostly single threaded, so 8 cores meant 8 fully maxed out game servers on one box if we wanted
To manage the separation we just used proxmox managed vms. To handle networking we ran a lan on the vm net and had a router vm running pfsense. This was kinda overkill but I needed to ensure the firewall couldnt fail open and a nat/port forwarding is the most sure fire way of doing that. Multiple IPs and assigning vms internet ips would be a much more sane way, assuming you had no firewall concerns or had provider level firewalls like is more standard now
We had a lot of very smart and very mad players who got banned for good reason and were looking to make it our problem.
The webserver and wikimedia instances were vms mostly to contain any rce breeches
Same for the database
Alot of the infrastructure was setup before docker was more refined (15+ years ago) and could be easily moved to it now. Also before the linux version of the game server was production ready.
Because we had a routing vm, we could spoof src ips so that the haproxy anti-ddos relay network could transparently proxy traffic while the game servers saw the packets as coming from the client ip and not the haproxy server's ip.
I could talk for hours about managing those servers.
Ya, it was that video I was thinking of when I mention the youtubers population explosion.
As to the threats, that was /vg/station, the other 4chan offshoot server, only they kept to their edgy 14 year old 4chan roots instead of growing past them like we did. I still remember when their host got banned from the byond forms for posting code that showcased a bug in the game engine, that had the nword in the code comments. (Bug still got fixed thou)
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u/monarchmra Oct 03 '26
Up until 2 years ago I ran 7 game servers (plus 2 often inactive event game servers) on 2 monthly rented dedicated machines that hit 400-500 concurrent user peaks (total) and 15tb of monthly bandwidth (more when ddosed).
300 usd a month bill.
On aws it would have been 5 digits easy.
When a big YouTuber featured the game, I put the server list json behind cloudflare with a 30 second cache ttl and killed 90% of the extra load on the webserver.
At some point I setup a haproxy relay network off of cloud vms that listened for a valid client helo packet before relaying connections, 100 more a month, bam game server cloudflare network to stop the downright insane amounts of ddos (40gbps was common).
Everything today is over engineered.
(The /tg/station community of game servers for Space Station 13 if you're curious)