Discussion: Where would you host (location & service), and why?

[J.Dre]

The two most common host locations are Europe and The United States. I'm curious as to which is better, and why it is better. This is a simple question of which I hope leads to much discussion. Please leave your feedback below. Feel free to transform this into a community resource! Make recommendations of hosting services, discuss DDoS protection, etc.

Thank you,
J.Dre

 

[DestinationSer]

I would rather host it in Canada or the Netherlands to provide best connection for both US and EU at the same time.
But having it in canada is The best choice, having it in Netherlands is the 2nd option if you cant have it in Canada

 

[Ahilphino]

europe, eliminates most of the brazol players

 

[Zasranets]

I live in the US so of course I'd pick for it to be hosted in the US.
I guess it just depends where the majority of players are.

 

[totolol123]

If you can't offer multiple host or don't need it, for sure the best choose is CANADA since this give a reasonable latency for EU, NA and SA.

 

[Alyyy]

I would go for Europe, US ppl doesn't lag in EU host

 

[J.Dre]

Appreciate all the feedback. Keep it coming!

@DestinationSer: I've been wanting to host using OVH, as they offer a great service. It is located in Canada. My friend in Sweden has about 110ms ping to their servers, and people in the United States have around 60ms ping. In my opinion, I think Canada would be the optimal choice considering the ability to reach all players of OpenTibia. A strong argument can be made for Europe, though. There are a large amount of players in Europe, and obviously you want to target the largest market / group of people.

 

[ATT3]

Appreciate all the feedback.

@DestinationSer: Agreed with your suggestion. I've been wanting to host using OVH, as they offer a great service. It is located in Canada. My friend in Sweden has about 110ms ping to their servers, and people in the United States have around 60ms ping. In my opinion, I think Canada would be the optimal choice considering the ability to reach all players of OpenTibia.

A strong argument can be made for Europe, though. There are a large amount of players in Europe, and obviously you want to target the largest market / group of people.

There are more Brazilian players playing tibia than in the whole EU.
So if you want to go near the largest audience, go to near them, Canada isn't that fair either - OVH seems very good, ddos protection etc. I feel like OVH is the best choice atm.
If you look who is hosting the top 5 Brazilian OTs, you can see that nearly all of them are hosted by OVH, Canada.
If you take take at look at the top 5 EU servers, you can see that hosteam.pl is fairly popular too, (twifysoft, hexana etc.) - but it surely is more pricey.
Well, many EU servers are hosted by OVH too, e.g gunzodus.net

 

[Evil Puncker]

europe, eliminates most of the brazol players

this.

or make a second server in br just to keep them away from the rest

 

[J.Dre]

There are more Brazilian players playing tibia than in the whole EU.
So if you want to go near the largest audience, go to near them, Canada isn't that fair either - OVH seems very good, ddos protection etc. I feel like OVH is the best choice atm.
If you look who is hosting the top 5 Brazilian OTs, you can see that nearly all of them are hosted by OVH, Canada.
If you take take at look at the top 5 EU servers, you can see that hosteam.pl is fairly popular too, (twifysoft, hexana etc.) - but it surely is more pricey.
Well, many EU servers are hosted by OVH too, e.g gunzodus.net

OVH is at the top of my list. The available hardware is also great. The only downside is that you need to install your own Firewalls and whatnot. But I'm sure I can find some help with that.

 

[Xanteria OT]

Europe as it's kind of in the middle of the world, and most players come from Europe so providing them with a lag-free server will improve your chances

 

[ATT3]

Europe as it's kind of in the middle of the world, and most players come from Europe so providing them with a lag-free server will improve your chances

According to otservlist, 54% of the servers are Brazilian.
From that we can make a conclusion that, indeed most tibian players come from Brazil. (more than from whole EU)

@J.Dre
OVH, is very affordable and has improved a lot during the past few years, ddos protection mostly.

On some level I feel like, if you're going to create a server to north america, your target audience should be Americans then.
Honestly, least to me - It doesn't feel good to play on a server, unless my connection is absolutely lag free - even minor lags can affect the gameplay a lot.

 

[Ahilphino]

Its true that brazil has the most tibia players but keep in mind most of the br players just exclusively play servers hosted in brazil and servers with brazil pages etc. And if you have brazol pages etc u scare away normal ppl. While almost every europe country can understand good english. So if you're making an english server I think it's best to keep it in europe, since if you put it in USA alot of europe people will lagg and unless you have much support for br players they wont even bother playing. Maybe canada is good, but every USA server i've played (im from sweden) is really laggy even with WTFast/TibiaTunnel etc.

So I think the way is to either focus on making a server for brazil ppl and host it in BRAZOL or make a server for english ppl and host it in europe. If we look at top servers on otservlist.org that's how it is right now + noxious but from looking on their playerlist we can see most players are brazol/venezuela etc.

 

[Alyyy]

Haha cmon ppl, everybody is racist about BRs

 

[ATT3]

Its true that brazil has the most tibia players but keep in mind most of the br players just exclusively play servers hosted in brazil and servers with brazil pages etc. And if you have brazol pages etc u scare away normal ppl. While almost every europe country can understand good english. So if you're making an english server I think it's best to keep it in europe, since if you put it in USA alot of europe people will lagg and unless you have much support for br players they wont even bother playing. Maybe canada is good, but every USA server i've played (im from sweden) is really laggy even with WTFast/TibiaTunnel etc.

So I think the way is to either focus on making a server for brazil ppl and host it in BRAZOL or make a server for english ppl and host it in europe. If we look at top servers on otservlist.org that's how it is right now + noxious but from looking on their playerlist we can see most players are brazol/venezuela etc.

Very good point and I totally agree with you.

After all, sounds much safer to create a European server, since majority here speaks English quite well.
But, there's always room for another but.
Currently there aren't any popular "English", American hosted servers out there, expect NoxiousOT (8.6)
So maybe there's a gap to fill?

 

[J.Dre]

In regards to DDoS mitigation, how many PPS/Gbps should one get as a precaution? At least 20Gbps DDoS protection? It can become quite expensive.

 

[Elwyn]

Haha cmon ppl, everybody is racist about BRs

It's self depreciation. Most of the comments were made by BRs.

@Topic
I hosted my server in Canada for one month. The ping was good for USA and BR players, it was hosted with don daniello. (BHS)
After this month in Canada, I moved for Amazon, their infrastructure is godly and I have only good things to say about customer support, quality of service and so on.
You can find Amazon datacenters all around the world, and they provide REALLY good support, no matter what you need. For example, it's super simple to configure the security of your server. To access the SSH of my server, you need a private key that matches another private key generated directly on their website using your account, the SSH only accept connection from my IP. Other than SSH and port 7171 to 7174, the server will automatically drop ANY connection, unless said to not do so.

They give really good services for free for one year, so what my server does have right now is:
One machine for the website (only accept ssh from my ip, as well as it needs my private key generated on the website matching theirs, other than that it'll only accept connections on port 80) (EC2, t2.micro)
One machine for the database (RDS)
One machine for the duplicate of the database (If for some reason one fail, the endpoint will automatically redirect to this one)
One machine for the server. (EC2, m3.large)

Keep in mind that of those 4 machines I only pay for one! I'll need to pay for all 4 of them only after one year.
Another thing is: The only ips able to connect on the database is mine, the website and the server.
The ping between the machine and the database is almost 0, as they're on the same network.
If I need to upgrade any of those machines, I don't need to reboot the machine, it'll only freeze the machine for little less than 2s. My friend needed to upgrade his machine while his server was online, the freeze was literally unnoticeable.

I could go on forever about how good Amazon is, but to make my point, Reddit/quora and other big websites are hosted at Amazon. IIRC Facebook is too.

 

[Nu77]

It's self depreciation. Most of the comments were made by BRs.

@Topic
I hosted my server in Canada for one month. The ping was good for USA and BR players, it was hosted with don daniello. (BHS)
After this month in Canada, I moved for Amazon, their infrastructure is godly and I have only good things to say about customer support, quality of service and so on.
You can find Amazon datacenters all around the world, and they provide REALLY good support, no matter what you need. For example, it's super simple to configure the security of your server. To access the SSH of my server, you need a private key that matches another private key generated directly on their website using your account, the SSH only accept connection from my IP. Other than SSH and port 7171 to 7174, the server will automatically drop ANY connection, unless said to not do so.

They give really good services for free for one year, so what my server does have right now is:
One machine for the website (only accept ssh from my ip, as well as it needs my private key generated on the website matching theirs, other than that it'll only accept connections on port 80) (EC2, t2.micro)
One machine for the database (RDS)
One machine for the duplicate of the database (If for some reason one fail, the endpoint will automatically redirect to this one)
One machine for the server. (EC2, m3.large)

Keep in mind that of those 4 machines I only pay for one! I'll need to pay for all 4 of them only after one year.
Another thing is: The only ips able to connect on the database is mine, the website and the server.
The ping between the machine and the database is almost 0, as they're on the same network.
If I need to upgrade any of those machines, I don't need to reboot the machine, it'll only freeze the machine for little less than 2s. My friend needed to upgrade his machine while his server was online, the freeze was literally unnoticeable.

I could go on forever about how good Amazon is, but to make my point, Reddit/quora and other big websites are hosted at Amazon. IIRC Facebook is too.

I'll look better but their hosting services looks really good, they have any service against DDoS ? I mean mitigation service or firewall range.

 

[Alyyy]

It's self depreciation. Most of the comments were made by BRs. .

Are you sure about that? maybe you need to have a look at the comments that obviously you didn't even look at it

 

[Elwyn]

Are you sure about that? maybe you need to have a look at the comments that obviously you didn't even look at it

Self depreciation meaning that they're BRs bad mouthing BRs. I did look at it, and it is self depreciation. Btw, we shouldn't discuss this on this topic.

I'll look better but their hosting services looks really good, they have any service against DDoS ? I mean mitigation service or firewall range.

They do have good mitigation services. Recently there was a failed attempt at DDoS'ing my server, it didn't last more than 2 minutes before Amazon cut off any malicious attempt, and no one at the server was disconnected, only experienced short freezes until the DDoS was cut.

Edit: And about firewall range, it can be easily configured using "Security Groups", if you create an account you'll see it.