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starting a host?
professorparabellum
Member
last few weeks ive been working to get our network online but we have so much empty rack space and our cabinet already pays itself. if i wanted to get my foot in the door for hosting, would it be a bad idea to start a free mc server host? im very experienced with adtech and i figured it would be a great start because i can offer a premium service for free (not like aternos) and i have more room for error instead of a guaranteed SLA and customers paying real money etc.
Comments
a free mc server hosting in this year? yeah.... no. It's a cool idea but who is going to pay for the server costs when you hit the negatives
you can start but some problems : DDoS attacks - netscan your network - ticketing
MC hosting is possible in this day and age, even for free - but you're gonna need to invest heavily in 3 major areas:
1) the bandwidth, they tend to use a lot. You're gonna need to ensure for every ~60 clients, you have 10Gb/s additional capacity. You really don't wanna oversell the bandwidth to the point it isn't usable. I'd honestly suggest not getting into it unless you have 100Gb/s minimum capacity already.
2) Upstream Volumetric DDoS Protection with Flowspec. This is a must. MC servers get a LOT of DDoS attacks. You can't be filtering it all locally - you'll need the larger upstream capacity to handle it and ideally flowspec so that you can have it dropped all the way up at T1 level or as close to it as possible.
3) Connect-X5 or better 100G NIC on host node with proper custom-made for the job XDP running on-NIC in proper Driver Mode. This should be filtering everything else not game related off entirely, except basic things like SSH and all for access and HTTPs remote port to allow updates and so on. In addition to blocking everything else, it should also be doing validation of every single protocol allowed and dropping junk.
If you already have a big business with all the basics and don't mind devoting the time and resources required for all this (you must be rich?) - it's fine and I'm sure people would love it. But especially being a free host, you will be target #1 of any DDoS tools and you will not be able to run this unprotected.
Just don't.
Give us better free tier than Oracle. Free dedi tier
In the current market, you could just sell VMs here at 2025 prices and you'd sell out of everything you have to offer. Do a soft launch with free VMs for a few months first so you don't need to worry about SLAs and then move to a paid model when you're confident you can make it work.
thank you for all of this! very helpful, we have datacamp as our upstream with their ddos mitigation but i heard its kind of crappy so we still might need filtering. 100gbps might be a bit much just to start off so ill probably just scale as the revenue comes in.
we have something malicious brewing
better start a gasstation atm!
MC = Minecraft?
Exactly!