Mirage Realms Server
Donation protected
Mirage Realms is a free to play MMORPG for the Android platform that has now outgrown its "hosted on a toaster at home" environment.
In order to reduce lag and support the games growth it is time to move it into a data center, and in order to do that I am going to need to build a brand new server.
Its important to note regardless of what this campaign raises I will be building this server and getting it into a data center by the end of February, what I am asking for is a little help with the initial build cost as its an expensive business.
I am going to handle the monthly running costs using our Patreon, and actually have a second hand server we could use if we really are forced to, but it is very low specification and I feel like if we are going to make this leap as a game we should do it properly.
So what does this money get us? Specs wise...
- 4ghz 8 core processor
- 16gb of ECC ram
- 1u server motherboard
- A case running a redundant power supply
- SSD raid
For those techies out there, the Mirage server heavily relies on threading so will benefit massively from a fast multi core processor. Currently we are running on a celeron and it's starting to struggle when we hit the higher online counts!
Our current toaster setup has only 4gb of ram and frequently maxes this going into swap, I don't want this to be an issue going forwards so 16gb should set us up for growth and buying ECC ram means it should be solid as a rock.
The case with redundant power supply is another very worthy expense, the two most frequent pieces of hardware to fail in Servers are the hard drive and the PSU, this set up means if one of our PSUs fail the second one will immediately take over, keeping the game running.
Hard drive space isn't really an issue so we will go with two fairly small samsung SSDs (reliability is key) in a raid configuration so if everything goes bang, you guys don't lose your hard earned experience points.
This will all go into a local data center and the server will be set up so I can remotely fix, patch, perform database work and update the game from anywhere whenever I need too which is a huge improvement over our current situation.
So this is the plan! What will it get you guys?
- Lower pings
- No more server lag due to running out of memory etc
- More uptime
- Much quicker "fixes" when things go wrong
- Much easier for me to update the game
This will also open the door to me building a new website and hosting it on the same machine, this website will link directly through to your game accounts and allow you to delete / manage your characters, as well as post in new forums as your characters themselves. When we implement guilds they will be given their own forums too and stuff such as items and monster data can be automatically made available directly from the game database so there will be no more wondering what monsters drop what, how much health an imp has etc.
This is only possible if we host our own website, which we can only do in a data center. This is a clear and solid move for the game, and I hope you guys all feel the same way :)
2017 is going to be a hell of a year people!
All the best,
Liam
In order to reduce lag and support the games growth it is time to move it into a data center, and in order to do that I am going to need to build a brand new server.
Its important to note regardless of what this campaign raises I will be building this server and getting it into a data center by the end of February, what I am asking for is a little help with the initial build cost as its an expensive business.
I am going to handle the monthly running costs using our Patreon, and actually have a second hand server we could use if we really are forced to, but it is very low specification and I feel like if we are going to make this leap as a game we should do it properly.
So what does this money get us? Specs wise...
- 4ghz 8 core processor
- 16gb of ECC ram
- 1u server motherboard
- A case running a redundant power supply
- SSD raid
For those techies out there, the Mirage server heavily relies on threading so will benefit massively from a fast multi core processor. Currently we are running on a celeron and it's starting to struggle when we hit the higher online counts!
Our current toaster setup has only 4gb of ram and frequently maxes this going into swap, I don't want this to be an issue going forwards so 16gb should set us up for growth and buying ECC ram means it should be solid as a rock.
The case with redundant power supply is another very worthy expense, the two most frequent pieces of hardware to fail in Servers are the hard drive and the PSU, this set up means if one of our PSUs fail the second one will immediately take over, keeping the game running.
Hard drive space isn't really an issue so we will go with two fairly small samsung SSDs (reliability is key) in a raid configuration so if everything goes bang, you guys don't lose your hard earned experience points.
This will all go into a local data center and the server will be set up so I can remotely fix, patch, perform database work and update the game from anywhere whenever I need too which is a huge improvement over our current situation.
So this is the plan! What will it get you guys?
- Lower pings
- No more server lag due to running out of memory etc
- More uptime
- Much quicker "fixes" when things go wrong
- Much easier for me to update the game
This will also open the door to me building a new website and hosting it on the same machine, this website will link directly through to your game accounts and allow you to delete / manage your characters, as well as post in new forums as your characters themselves. When we implement guilds they will be given their own forums too and stuff such as items and monster data can be automatically made available directly from the game database so there will be no more wondering what monsters drop what, how much health an imp has etc.
This is only possible if we host our own website, which we can only do in a data center. This is a clear and solid move for the game, and I hope you guys all feel the same way :)
2017 is going to be a hell of a year people!
All the best,
Liam
Organizer
Liam Stewart
Organizer