Recommended Cloud?
 

Anyone have an idea of what would be the recommended stats (storage, RAM, CPU) for running a server.

Would it be possible to host the server on amazon's EC2 cloud service, is this a viable option?

Thanks for any feedback.

I think there's two ways to tackle this one.. You can go multiple servers, (zone servers, world server, etc) and go for tiny boxes, or one mega box like it's usually designed.

I've thought about doing this for a while, if I do, will let you know.

I run the server on a laptop myself. single core 1.6ghz 3gb of ram and you really including the server and OS only need about 20gb of free storage. I run 50 zones on that setup and it works great because power outages dont screw me over either. You can do cloud storage you could do google drive. its 15gb of free storage. So as long as you use some kind of program like symantic system recovery to compress the files its very viable.

I have a windows based one running on amazon AWS (free). Runs very well.

I also have other windows based servers and several linux that are hosted at cloudatcost com and all run well. As far as specs, it depends on what you want to do with it. Windows or linux on a couple gigs of ram and 2-4 CPUs can allow up to 10 or probably 20 players at once with no problems.

I am working on a new server at the moment that is windows 2012 r2 based. It loads 100 zones (90 static/10 dynamic) on 8 Gigs of ram and 8 CPUs. It runs very well and the load from the zones only hits 4.4 Gigs of ram in use.

Celestial

Awesome guys, thanks for all the information! I would hate to trivialize things, but it would be cool to have an instance of a cloud computer setup with the baseline applications to run a server and that could be cloned just to get started.

I tossed one up for fun last night.
It's a linux box however, I did the AWS Free tier (1gb) with SSD option. The stupid thing has a 14ms ping for me, lol.

Configuring linux unfortunately is not super simple, my guide is out of date, and I know this is for Windows, but my memory footprint with a clean bootup on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is 296MB with ucs/world/1 zone running, and mysql as well. Each zone adds about 15 MB. I think the 1 gig cap would be hit pretty quickly when the DB caches and memory allocations occur from player load + zones needed, but it seems viable especially at a starter tier of a server.

Dunno the config for the other guy doing free windows, but figured this may be informative.

If you create an AWS account, and opt in for the free 1 year, and then go to services ->EC2, and create instance, and choose a Windows instance (free tier eligable), then toss in http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=38836 that would get you started.

You'd need to do some configuration for the security policies, and adjust the eqemu_config.xml, but that's probably the fastest/easiest way currently.

I'm unsure how much memory the Windows tier gives you, and how much a running EQEMU instance is in a windows environment, but potentially could do it all on free.