Need Help With Planning

1.) Completely ignore what ASUMagic said specwise, he has no idea what he's talking about (cause I doubt he's actually run a server himself)
2.) Minimum specs required can be found here: https://doc.kag2d.com/wiki/Server#Lowest_Hardware that's enough to run you one TDM server or an 8 person CTF. If you want to run a more normal CTF server, then use what it says under recommended and it should run you a 24 person server fine. If you want to run it with 32 people, you need an increase in CPU (probs around 2.2 GHz ~ 2.3 GHz) and more Ram (I'd guess around 1GB total). I don't really recommend going past 32 since at that point servers become unstable and resource use grows exponentially for each new player added.

For @Swabbin: VPS stands for Virtual Private Server.

You have 2 types of servers: Dedicated and Virtual. A dedicated server is a server where the entirety of the machine is owned/used by one person. If the hardware specs of the machine are 10 core 3.0 GHz and 1 TB of RAM, then you'd have the ability to use all of it. A VPS differs from a Dedicated in that the machine is being used by several different people. So even if the physical machine has specs of 10 core 3.0 GHz and 1 TB of RAM, you'd only get to access the amount you'd paid for, so it might end up equivalent to 1 core 3.0 GHz and 1000 MB of RAM. The rest of the remaining resources are used by other people who also bought a VPS and are using that same machine. VPS are cheaper than Dedicated ones because of this, and in general, most people just need a VPS at most since they aren't managing huge websites or anything that receives massive traffic.

 

Well it depends on where you look at. Arcrave's been using this one personally: https://www.nfoservers.com/order-virtual-dedicated-server.php (the unmanaged, single core, Linux only option) and it's about 10 bucks per month (less if you pay for more ahead of time). We haven't had any issues as far as service go and they handle things pretty fast. It'll run you at around 3-4 beta servers, 2-3 if you increase the number people on it.

The one Aphelion linked is cheaper but based on all the comments I've seen below it, it seems unreliable. Can't really comment more on it cept that it's cheap.

General Price per month is around 10~20 USD (cheapest option since you aren't going to need a higher end one for KAG) depending on who you buy it from and the overall specs.
Anyways, if you deciding to get a end up buying a server, don't buy a "Gaming Server". It's a waste of money, just get look under VPS.

Also, you'll be configuring most of things using Linux CLI commands via SSH, so you'll want to learn a little bit of linux. Most other server owners have done it before, so if you do end up getting issues after reading the configuration instructions from the wiki, you can ask server owners on IRC (since they have done the same thing).

 

He's running from Atlanta/GA.

I'm personally using one from lowendbox: http://lowendbox.com/blog/hostus-7month-3gb-and-4-50month-1gb-openvz-vps-in-atlanta/

It's worked great so far, hosting 3 KAG servers and a starbound server.

The one downside is it uses CentOS 6, you want to avoid CentOS6 if you can as it does not have the proper libraries for KAG and you will end up having to do this: https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/solved-library-not-found.17987/

 

NFO does let you can chose where to run it (Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, San Jose, Seattle or Frankfrut) and it does give the option to choose basically any Linux install.

I will have to say that that OpenVZ VPS offer does impress me quite a bit, might have to ask Arcrave swap over to it if he doesn't mind us fixing it to work with kag since that deal is pretty great, especially considering those specs.

 

I've been looking on lowendbox as well, and I found this one:

https://www.semoweb.com/billing/cart.php?gid=43

The last one at the bottom

Looks pretty good as well, the differences in price vs performance > meh, you could argue that I guess

 

It's fine to run a contest where the winner gets to basically get a VPS for some amount of time if that's what you mean. It wouldn't be the first time it's done: https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/gamemode-innovation-contest.15512/ being the most recent one.

Anyways, just make sure you post it here: https://forum.kag2d.com/forums/contests/ and that it doesn't break any of the forum rules (obviously)

That's fine

 

Guess you could, just tell them Up/Down time, Location, Speed and such info about your server in the thread if you make it.

 

Yeah, it's your contest