Possible Hosting Company Idea?

yucchun · March 17

I want to start a hosting project with some servers I have laying around and the main idea was to host Pterodactyl and NAT based servers as I don't own nor intend to own an ASN to manage dedicated allocations.

I know that the hosting market for this kind of stuff is WILDLY saturated though, so, I was thinking about something like, what could I do to go over the other hosting providers, and, tell me if this sounds crazy or not.

My idea was that I'd start out by offering free resources on a small node and offer paid plans on the side. I could pull an Aternos-sort-of-move on the free resource plans and implement ads in the Pterodactyl dashboard.

And it would be like, instead of the user purchasing, let's say, a 1GB MC server, the user purchases a 1GB allocation in the server to split in how many instances he'd like to.

Although this opens up the port problem, I'd limit it to like, server must have at least 64 or 128MB of RAM so nobody uses up all the port allocations.

Think of the free resources as the Ngrok free plan, it's bad, but it's usable, and you'd love to have more.

Otus9051 · March 17

The ASEAN Market probably needs more game hosts, I have gotten through many providers in the whole ASEAN region and none really manage to satisfy my needs, ended up buying a VPS.

I think you could be able to flourish in this market, I'm saying Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc.

yucchun · March 17

@Otus9051 said:
The ASEAN Market probably needs more game hosts, I have gotten through many providers in the whole ASEAN region and none really manage to satisfy my needs, ended up buying a VPS.

I think you could be able to flourish in this market, I'm saying Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc.

I see, I do have a colocation in the Philippines that I could use!
Or I can just do as I initially planned, I mean, I live in Japan. My ping towards that area is like 50ms at most.

Thank you for the suggestion! I already own a domain (hostaroo.net), so what I think I'll do is just start launching out trials to people from here in exchange for feedback.

Oh yeah, launching trials, whoever wants to test it out, drop me a PM.

rsk · March 17

Don’t forget your ddos protection

yucchun · March 17

@rsk said:
Don’t forget your ddos protection

Right, my TP-Link router's going to shambles depending on the hit I get.

wankel · March 17

Good luck!

yucchun · March 17

I had attached a poll, but for some reason I don't see it here, here's what it asked:

Would LES users be interested in a service like this?
Since this might bring out spam, PM me an answer 😖

treesmokah · March 17

Game servers are DDoS magnets, period. And especially Minecraft, you don't have to sell anything to become a target. Out of all "online" communities, you probably got the most attacks there, even more than CoD scene probably.

If you got no DDoS protection, It doesn't make sense in my opinion, look in to some reverse proxies/tunnels with ddos protection maybe?

somik · March 17

@treesmokah said:
Game servers are DDoS magnets, period. And especially Minecraft, you don't have to sell anything to become a target. Out of all "online" communities, you probably got the most attacks there, even more than CoD scene probably.

If you got no DDoS protection, It doesn't make sense in my opinion, look in to some reverse proxies/tunnels with ddos protection maybe?

There isn't much options with just NAT so gameservers are the primary use case for servers without dedicated IPs. Reverse proxy is ok but are usually a pain to setup specially if he wants to offload most of this to the end user as he will still have to setup this himself...

webcraft · March 17

@somik said:
Reverse proxy is ok but are usually a pain to setup specially if he wants to offload most of this to the end user as he will still have to setup this himself...

If it's for Minecraft, wouldn't it be sufficient to rent a small 1GB VPS with decent DDoS Protection and host BungeeCord/Velocity there which is the proxy to your server where the actual server is hosted? Idk if there's more performant proxies than bungee/velo but they're easy to setup.

yucchun · March 18

@treesmokah said:
Game servers are DDoS magnets, period. And especially Minecraft, you don't have to sell anything to become a target. Out of all "online" communities, you probably got the most attacks there, even more than CoD scene probably.

If you got no DDoS protection, It doesn't make sense in my opinion, look in to some reverse proxies/tunnels with ddos protection maybe?

Hey! Good news, I have DDoS protection backed by my network provided and my router to top things off. Apparently my router includes ICMP, UDP and TCP flood blacklisting and my provider has rate-limiting settings I can automate.

I get 5Gbps unlimited connectivity here, but I should still set a bandwidth limit for my users right? Just to be abuse-conscious?

yucchun · March 18

@webcraft said:

@somik said:
Reverse proxy is ok but are usually a pain to setup specially if he wants to offload most of this to the end user as he will still have to setup this himself...

If it's for Minecraft, wouldn't it be sufficient to rent a small 1GB VPS with decent DDoS Protection and host BungeeCord/Velocity there which is the proxy to your server where the actual server is hosted? Idk if there's more performant proxies than bungee/velo but they're easy to setup.

If I have to tunnel I'd probably use one of those Playit.gg IPs, a dedicated IPv4 is less than $10/mo there.

yucchun · March 18

I'll start preparing things today, if anybody is interested drop a message with the e-mail you'd like to register with in my PMs and I'll grant you an account with the same username you use in LES and a shabby password that you need to change as soon as you enter the panel.

I'm going to setup Virtualizor, Pterodactyl and Paymenter in the server. Expect this to be a long free trial, consider that servers are probably not going to be down, but they sure are going to restart very often.

Otus9051 · March 18

@yucchun said:
I'll start preparing things today, if anybody is interested drop a message with the e-mail you'd like to register with in my PMs and I'll grant you an account with the same username you use in LES and a shabby password that you need to change as soon as you enter the panel.

I'm going to setup Virtualizor, Pterodactyl and Paymenter in the server. Expect this to be a long free trial, consider that servers are probably not going to be down, but they sure are going to restart very often.

Sent my email to you

Otus9051 · March 18

Also, I have been using PufferPanel instead of Pterodactyl. It seems fairly easy to set up (last time I tried to setup Pterodactyl everything just went bad and I had to quite literally reinstall my whole server) and has mostly all the features I need.

@yucchun might want to try both of them, just to tally.

yucchun · March 18

@Otus9051 said:

@yucchun said:
I'll start preparing things today, if anybody is interested drop a message with the e-mail you'd like to register with in my PMs and I'll grant you an account with the same username you use in LES and a shabby password that you need to change as soon as you enter the panel.

I'm going to setup Virtualizor, Pterodactyl and Paymenter in the server. Expect this to be a long free trial, consider that servers are probably not going to be down, but they sure are going to restart very often.

Sent my email to you

Hey! Got it. Quick heads up, the Pterodactyl panel is running in a cheap VPS I have in Germany and Wings (the actual servers) are running both in Germany and Japan. This is a quick solution I found to my current basement hosting situation. But I'll fix it when I have time.

The downside to this is that the panel might take a little longer to open, but rest assured, still Asian ping.

@Otus9051 said:
Also, I have been using PufferPanel instead of Pterodactyl. It seems fairly easy to set up (last time I tried to setup Pterodactyl everything just went bad and I had to quite literally reinstall my whole server) and has mostly all the features I need.

@yucchun might want to try both of them, just to tally.

I'll set it up on a development environment and test it out, thanks!

yucchun · March 18

@yucchun said:

@Otus9051 said:

@yucchun said:
I'll start preparing things today, if anybody is interested drop a message with the e-mail you'd like to register with in my PMs and I'll grant you an account with the same username you use in LES and a shabby password that you need to change as soon as you enter the panel.

I'm going to setup Virtualizor, Pterodactyl and Paymenter in the server. Expect this to be a long free trial, consider that servers are probably not going to be down, but they sure are going to restart very often.

Sent my email to you

Hey! Got it. Quick heads up, the Pterodactyl panel is running in a cheap VPS I have in Germany and Wings (the actual servers) are running both in Germany and Japan. This is a quick solution I found to my current basement hosting situation. But I'll fix it when I have time.

The downside to this is that the panel might take a little longer to open, but rest assured, still Asian ping.

@Otus9051 said:
Also, I have been using PufferPanel instead of Pterodactyl. It seems fairly easy to set up (last time I tried to setup Pterodactyl everything just went bad and I had to quite literally reinstall my whole server) and has mostly all the features I need.

@yucchun might want to try both of them, just to tally.

I'll set it up on a development environment and test it out, thanks!

PufferPanel looks so android settings menu themed, but I like it. I might consider a vote between the trial users in the future.

This is what Pterodactyl looks like so far.

I will now configure Virtualizor

yucchun · March 18

Virtualizor is now up and running, but I still need to read the docs.

I like doing stuff with an objective in mind, it's better than setting up a disposable Ptero instance

Possible Hosting Company Idea?

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