Cluster Options

[thayxen]

What are people using these days? I noticed prices are garbage on everyone offering (Nitrado, Qonzer, etc), and where they are not garbage, the hardware or data center options are garbage (gravel, etc). Can set up on a VPS, but looks like Ascended is currently windows only at the moment, and prices aren't great in that realm either.

Does anyone have a decent setup going?

[𝓝𝓪𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓫𝓸𝓲]

I just use my old gaming PC as my server. I just have SteamCMD setup and a script to update the server as well as another script to launch all the servers.

I prefer having complete control over my server. Files, OS, physical machine.

ASA takes more to run server side, particularly RAM, so not surprising the prices are higher for renting a server. Still a rip off though, especially with hosts like Nitrado that have no cluster deals; every server is another entire full cost...

[Vig]

Yeah search Bigpond
7 maps up clustered

[thayxen]

Originally posted by Vig:

Yeah search Bigpond
7 maps up clustered

Thanks. I find a lot of discussion about it, but not the reference itself. I imagine it's Aussie, as I have some aussie relatives that had that as an ISP years ago. So maybe it's not here in the US.

[dagger]

Self hosted on a custom server build. Faster than Nitrado by a big margin. (dual AMD Epyc 9474F with water cooled, 1536GB DDR5 ECC ram, 14 TB of redundant datacenter NVME drives in a RAID10 setup)

Prices are going to be expensive depending on how many maps you are hosting due to 2-3x higher resources usage than ASE. I host 21 maps between a few different games on the above setup with capacity for the rest of the ASA maps on the roadmap.

To put the above coat into context, enterprise server hardware is expensive. I sourced some of the items used and the above server build still cost ~$30,000 US dollars. If it was bought new from Dell the MSRP would have been between 70,000 - 80,000 USD. The server renting data centers have to recoup costs on top of utilities.

[thayxen]

Originally posted by dagger:

Self hosted on a custom server build. Faster than Nitrado by a big margin. (dual AMD Epyc 9474F with water cooled, 1536GB DDR5 ECC ram, 14 TB of redundant datacenter NVME drives in a RAID10 setup)

Prices are going to be expensive depending on how many maps you are hosting due to 2-3x higher resources usage than ASE. I host 21 maps between a few different games on the above setup with capacity for the rest of the ASA maps on the roadmap.

That's a $40k setup, and for what you're doing you could've done it for $5k. I'd just be containerizing three maps and can unload two of them with some persistence mods. Was poking around for a cheaper alternative that doesn't require me to orchestrate.

[dagger]

Originally posted by 123:

Originally posted by dagger:

Self hosted on a custom server build. Faster than Nitrado by a big margin. (dual AMD Epyc 9474F with water cooled, 1536GB DDR5 ECC ram, 14 TB of redundant datacenter NVME drives in a RAID10 setup)

Prices are going to be expensive depending on how many maps you are hosting due to 2-3x higher resources usage than ASE. I host 21 maps between a few different games on the above setup with capacity for the rest of the ASA maps on the roadmap.

That's a $40k setup, and for what you're doing you could've done it for $5k. I'd just be containerizing three maps and can unload two of them with some persistence mods. Was poking around for a cheaper alternative that doesn't require me to orchestrate.

I know the list price is overpriced hence why I said MSRP not including discounts.

The system is not solely used for game servers and I plan to run other things on including playing around with self hosted private ai models tied into text to speech interfaces. The perks of having a personal data center.

The $5k price point you quote would also fully consume the resources since it could have been 2-3 separate consumer end hardware (Ryzen 7950x with 128gb of ram). That would have limited growth plus made maintenance and utilities cost higher per month. The above setup is only using 15% of the CPU resources.

[thayxen]

Originally posted by dagger:

The system is not solely used for game servers and I plan to run other things on including playing around with self hosted private ai models tied into text to speech interfaces. The perks of having a personal data center.

Yeah I have no doubt some fun can be had with that. Would definitely put it to work. Just found a setup on Hetzner that could do what I'm wanting for about half price of a managed game service. Still not crazy about it though. Anyway, cheers

[dagger]

Originally posted by 123:

Originally posted by dagger:

The system is not solely used for game servers and I plan to run other things on including playing around with self hosted private ai models tied into text to speech interfaces. The perks of having a personal data center.

Yeah I have no doubt some fun can be had with that. Would definitely put it to work. Just found a setup on Hetzner that could do what I'm wanting for about half price of a managed game service. Still not crazy about it though. Anyway, cheers

I fully understand. I have been spending 2500-2600 out of pocket each month paying off the server. Once the hardware is paid for though the running costs are very little vs renting which will always be painful each month.

I hope your hardware works well for you.

[Automatic12pro]

we use a vps with 12 cores @2.59ghz and 90 GB DDR4. It hosts 6-7 maps comfortably for 15+ players. Each map has a batch script for launch tied to task scheduler, custom scripts for updating, and a powershell script to restore any that crash

TBH It'd be cheaper to get a gen 3 threadripper w/128GB ram off of Ebay (Ex. https://www.ebay.com/itm/186709885459). VPS is about $140/mo

[Automatic12pro]

Also, starting the ark servers via task scheduler with elevated privileges after startup open them as background processes. When ran this way you wont see the server console but they use %50-%90 less resources than normal. IDK why but they do and there has been no down side

[thayxen]

Originally posted by Automatic12pro:

Also, starting the ark servers via task scheduler with elevated privileges after startup open them as background processes. When ran this way you wont see the server console but they use %50-%90 less resources than normal. IDK why but they do and there has been no down side

Thanks, that's a good tip

[thayxen]

It's taken me 72 hours, but I almost have a working cluster set up with Rocky Linux 9. Having done this all with ASE many times, I just have to say that it's retardedly over-complicated with ASA at the moment; native Linux support aside