2021 Server Hosting/Rental Options

[CrimsonGhost]

Hello all. Quick question for those in the know, but has anyone found an affordable server hosting service that will work with DCS? I have repeatedly looked into hosting a server for my friends and I to play on from time to time, or even running one locally on my machine, but Its always been too much hassle. There are numerous threads on here inquiring about the same question but nothing recent. Anyone have any new info to share? Thanks. 

[Noisy]

https://ready-room.net/ is my hobby project. Upload a mission and have it run in AWS Sydney or AWS N Virginia for ~0.50US / hr.

[CrimsonGhost]

Wow, this is awesome! I will check it out today with a few friends and see how it goes. You might be on to something here.

[Noisy]

Cheers, maybe. I've been thinking about discontinuing it. I've been hosting missions for the Flying Kiwis for about a year and it's worked well. I think we average around 15 pilots a session. But beyond that there hasn't been a lot of interest / I'm not great at advertising.

 

The average bill I'm getting from Amazon atm is about $60/month, which isn't too bad compared against renting a physical server 24x7 (and the Flying Kiwis have graciously passed the hat around, so I'm out of pocket less than this). But if I we're my own customer I think it would be closer to $20/month ... 4 weeks * 3 sessions * 3 hours * $0.56 ~ $20. The difference is in the fixed costs, primarily hosting the webservice and the game data.

 

The game data, which is close to 100GB these days costs a few bucks per AWS region per version per month. Because installing DCS onto SSDs is necessary for performance and SSDs are always given to you as blank disks when starting an instance, DCS basically has to be installed from scratch each time. Ordinarily it takes DCS around an hour to install itself, mainly due to the torrent download as well as having to uncompress once downloaded. Maintaining the uncompressed game data in the local datacenter, as well as just copying the map the required for the mission shortens the install to a few minutes. So starting an instance, installing DCS, and starting DCS is kept to about 10min with this approach. Although a drawback is that I need to update the game data for each datacenter each time a new DCS version comes out.

 

Otherwise the direct costs for hosting are the instance cost (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/), the disk cost (negligible), and the outbound data cost. Outbound data is a function of number of players and mission size, but doing the accounting would need more work / hard to apply in a pre-paid model - so I'm hoping the the figures I've chosen will cover this, I guess I'll find out with time.

 

Anyway I still had fun just putting all this together. Any issues or suggestions please hit me up here or discord.

 

Edit: I've written up a guide for DIY AWS hosting as well if you would rather take that approach https://ready-room.net/blog/2020-12-01-host-a-dcs-server-in-aws/

               

Edited February 19, 2021 by Noisy

[oldmanflan]

On 2/17/2021 at 3:50 AM, Noisy said:

https://ready-room.net/ is my hobby project. Upload a mission and have it run in AWS Sydney or AWS N Virginia for ~0.50US / hr.

Very cool. My Dad and I tend to fly together but he gets overwhelmed by the chaos of the big servers and it's not enjoyable for him. This lead me down the rabbit hole of creating/hosting my own server a while back. I was successful, but the overall setup, including removal of Windows firewall protection and constant re-configuration of the router settings seemingly every time I wanted to host it, got very old, very fast.

I'm creating a new training mission for him and I, using the South Atlantic map. I'm going to give your hosting solution a shot and see how it goes. Thank you for creating this!

 

[Noisy]

Cheers. It’s still going. it’s proven over time to be a great way for my squadron to run missions. Other folks have found value in it as well, so it’s turned out so far to be sustainable.