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Cost of server maintenance


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Posted

I want to know; what is the cost of server maintenance; I mean gamemode which scripter do? How much could be worth? Mapping? Webmaster? Hosting/VPS or something - how much cost?

I mean RP project

 

 

Posted (edited)

Depends on what quality you're expecting...

Low End Server:
Domain = $10 a year for a .com 
Web Hosting = $0 - Simply set this up on your VPS with WAMP, or XAMPP. 
Website & Forums = $0 - You can easily download a bootstrap template and edit it to your liking, and use free forum software such phpBB. (although you won't have a UCP).
VPS = $15 a month.
Mapping = $0 - You can easily do this yourself, if you're unable to map, most offer this for free.
Gamemode = $0 - There are a few open source / free RP game modes.
Total per Month = About $20

High End Server
Domain = $10 a year for .com
Web Hosting = $5/per month - A good example would be hostgator.
Website with UCP = $50/per lifetime - You could probably find a web developer in the price range for a clean looking UCP.
Forums = $100/per lifetime IPB is a widely used forum software among RP communities.
Dedicated Server with DDoS Protection = $100/per month - I'd suggest using OVH as they provide 1GBPS ports, and free DDoS protection.
Mapping = $5 - 10/per map - This is something you'd have to negotiate with a mapper, but I wouldn't pay anymore than $10 for a map.
Gamemode = $500 - Again something you'd have to negotiate with a developer. But if you want a fully functional RP gamemode with top notch features, $500 would definitely get you that.
Total = About $200 a month.

Edited by Israel
Posted

Expenses can range, a lot. Our community has been in development for about two years, and for several reasons, we have quite a good amount of costs. I guess it doesn't hurt to go through them.

 

Servers (Total monthly: $95.95)

We have several servers, for a couple of different reasons, let's go through them.

  1. Test Server ($21.99) - This is an upgraded version of an OVH Virtual Private server used for testing deployment. We use Gitlab with CI for automatic deployment when changes are made to the script. This also hosts a Sentry error monitoring system.
  2. Production Server ($56.99) - This is our primary server. This hosts a couple of different things. Right now, that consists of the RAGE MP server, web server, and a couple of other production utilities we have created. 
  3. VPN Server ($3.99) - Access to management of our resources is limited to keys and white-listed IPs only. We use a small server to host a private VPN server to prevent access.
  4. Bot Server ($3.99) - This server is used to host all bots relating to our project. Such as our verification bot, development bot, etc for Discord.
  5. Server Monitoring ($8.99) - We've used a couple of different monitoring solutions such as DataDog, NIXStats, and a few others.

Web Services (Total monthly: $16.99)

  1. Mail services hosted by web host ($16.99)
  2. DNS managed by CloudFlare (free)
  3. SSL Certificate (Free)

Other Payments

  1. StatBot stats history ($3.00)

 

How we manage to save money, and build a stronger community

  1. Our developers are community sourced. While we would love to pay our development team, we rarely generate enough profit to cover server costs. We have plans to pay our developers, but right now it's community based - We allow our developers to treat Mafia City as their own community. 
  2. Mapping is also community sourced. We have a small team of dedicated individuals who have created custom models for us, and have put a lot of effort in creating in-game locations to support roleplay.

 

Our overall community takes on ALOT of secondary projects. For this reason, we have an additional VPS ($14.99) and dedicated server ($56.99) so we're not cluttering our production services. Our total monthly cost comes out to be ~$188.91. This has fluctuated a lot lately as I've been working towards consolidating resources when it comes our management. We used to sit closer to the ~$220 per month price point. Running a community can host quite a good bit of money, but at the end of the day, you shouldn't be in it for revenue. We have a shit ton of monthly one-time costs for different things that are purchased for the project. Such as our Xenforo license ($160), Forum Addons (~$250-300 worth) and various other utilities to run our community.  We thrive on trying to build our community to make it the best it can be, not the best business it can be. We do deploy quite a large amount of business practices in our daily operations, but it has never been our motivation to make profit. 

 

Every project has it's own costs though. If a server owner happens to be a developer you can easily get a community running for $14.99 by creating the script and UCP yourself and run a MyBB or PHPBB forum on the same box. 

 

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