I hope this is in the right section. We rent Xen pv VPSs and we are wondering if any other hosts allow Minecraft or other game servers/bots (like Runescape bots)? Our minimal experience in the past has shown that these clients use a disproportional amount of shared resources (CPU, disk I/O, etc.).

Your current host does not allow you do run a Minecraft server? That's rather strange - in my experience, most VPS providers don't limit what you can put on a VPS. The whole point of VPSes is you can do just as much as you can with a dedicated server, just for a tenth of the price.

At present theyre are quite a few VPS' designed specifically for minecraft-esque hosting. Minecraft is heavy ram, low cpu, high IO.

If you allow for the above you should have no issues hosting minecraft vps services.

If I remember rightly there's a minecraft panel OS made specifically for this type of hosting.

Hope this helps, good luck with your venture.

The only thing you may have to worry about is being viewed as an abuser due to the high i/o

low CPU? Are you sure?

I have hosted several, and all I have seen is loads above 8.00 at times and regularly at 2-3.00.

Ram is mainly at 1.5GB to get it all start 1.2GB sometimes, but yes, the CPU is heavy, seriously heavy, thats when we decided to limit those types of users, however Xen would most likely handle the CPU better than openVZ.

In comparison of other game servers yes I'm sure, cpu will only generally spike if world generation or a mod is forcing it to do so.

I don't see a problem with allowing gameservers to be hosted on a vps. As long as the node is setup correctly it shouldn't be a problem for there server. I would recommend looking for a xen hosted vps though as it is completely isolated from every other vps.

Many hosts would certainly not put any restriction however it's better that you confirm before you actually get signed up with someone.

A real Xen or VMWare VPS should have guaranteed resources with which you can do what you please. I would not stick with a provider if they didn't allow me to run a legal application with the resources they sold me!

Cheers,
Dave

I would only allow on a XEN VPS

Yeah, after reading this that is quiet strange that they would restrict minecraft servers. - I know with us, if the client is hosting game servers and are causing high CPU usage on the main nodes, we recommend they upgrade to a dedicated server.

Anyways, I don't see why that would be a problem till your game gets hundreds to thousands of players. Of course isolating your game server to a dedicated server in most cases would improve performance, especially having a dedicated network.

Using VPS for the Minicraft or any other resource hungry online gaming is not so practical. Dedicated server or Cloud server would be the best choice, as these hosting solutions can cope up the server loads pretty decently.

Xen is great for Minecraft hosting and any other Java intensive applications such as Runecraft.

I do not allow game servers on openvzs

I use openvz and allow gameservers such as minecraft, my nodes do extremely well. No complaints and no high loads. You just have to make sure your not overselling your servers.

We use quad core amd servers with 32 GB of ram per server and the gameservers are on 3-4 GB of ram virts with 1.5 ghz running each game server.