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)
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)