Which of these systems should I host on?

[yexxle]

So, I've been looking for dedicated hosting and have settled on a host. Now I need to choose the box I will host with. I've also narrowed my list of desirable setups to one of the following systems. Each comes with standard 10Mbps port.

Option 1: ($85/month)
    * Intel Celeron 1.7GHz
    * 1GB RAM
    * 1 x 120GB HD
    * 1200GB monthly transfer

Option 2: ($89/month)
    * AMD Athlon™ XP 2100 (1.73Ghz)
    * 1GB RAM
    * 1 x 80GB HD
    * 2000GB monthly transfer
    * No setup fee

Option 3: ($119/month)
    * AMD Athlon™ XP 2600 (2.13Ghz)
    * 1GB RAM
    * 2 x 80GB HD
    * 2000GB monthly transfer
    * No setup fee

Option 1 is cheap and comes with a good amount of disk space; the only drawback is the celeron, for which I can't help but bite my cheek. Option 2 is good because it's only $4/month more than the celeron and suddenly I've got AMD; drawback is I lose 40GB of disk space. Option 3 looks great because it's AMD at just over 2Ghz, and 2 harddrives (totalling 160GB), which would allow me to do more frequent "quick backups" in addition to the daily off-location backup.

Would the celeron actually be suitable for running a 16-24 player server (or possibly 2-3 of them)? I've seen the recommended requirements for bandwidth and RAM, but not for CPU. How CPU intensive is a 24 player game?

[FliesLikeABrick]

If you're only hosting one server, the celeron is more than enough.



This is very important though: is that 10mbit drop only for you, or is it shared with other customers of theirs?  If it is shared, that is very,very bad because you will end up getting major lag on your servers every time that one of their other customers has a large download being hosted.

a 24 player server will run just fine on any of those machines, as long as the machine (especially the celeron) isn't doing anything else (like running websites, etc).  I'd say you should even be fine running 2-3 of them on the celeron, again.. as long as it is doing nothing else.

I wouldn't use one machine for game server hosting+website hosting unless it has dual cores or dual processors



Also worth note:
- Your "quick backups" to the same machine will cause your game servers to lag badly because you'll create an I/O bottleneck
- Make sure you throttle your off-site backups so that they don't take up more than, say, 200KB/s of your bandwidth so that your game servers don't lag.

[yexxle]

Thanks for the comment. The issue of shared 10Mb connection was the first question on my own list. As soon as I've decided on a box, the first thing I'm asking is exactly that. The company I'm looking at is quite large and comes recommended to me by a co-worker (who is a network sysadmin who wouldn't deal with a company with an unlikeable network). Shared 10Mbps to me screams similarity to jumping on a virtual hosted machine with 200 other customers - you're asking for trouble.

Depending on the assuredness of my network connection and the soldat server(s) I intend to run, I will definitely throttle any local and/or off-site backups. I may also host a small web server for simple items; if so, that web server will be throttled to hell and back (it would all be short html docs, no images or downloads). One connection per ip, max of a couple simultaneous requests. Small stuff, really.

Do you have any ballpark figures for CPU usage? I realize this changes dramatically, especially with scripting, but it'd be nice to have some sort of figure ahead of time (even if it's pretty inaccurate).

[Xxypher]

Option 2: ($89/month)
    * AMD Athlon™ XP 2100 (1.73Ghz)
    * 1GB RAM
    * 1 x 80GB HD
    * 2000GB monthly transfer
    * No setup fee


This one sounds good to me.