It's that time again! We have ordered a new server from our GSP. It is actually going to cost us less money, but has pretty much the same stats as our current dedicated box. This time, however, we are getting a managed server, which means that NuclearFallout will take care of updating our servers automatically when Valve releases a patch. We do lose some freedoms, such as being able to run other processes on the box that aren't game servers, but we gain the ability to install games on our new box that are restricted by the game maker, such as Battlefield: Bad Company 2 or some of the Call of Duty games. Another advantage to the managed server is that NuclearFallout's secret server optimizations are taken care of for us so that we can juice more performance out of the server than we were capable of on our own. We will experience some downtime in the near future when the IPs we have been using are migrated to the new server. Theoretically, the servers should immediately come up and be running after the IPs are moved and assigned to the servers, but until I am notified of the IP migration, the servers will be without SourceBans, our IRC Bot, and possibly HLStats. I will make sure to get those things running as soon as I can, though. The ticket informing NFO that we are ready for the IPs to be moved ha been sebt in, so you should probably expect this to happen today or tomorrow. If there is a delay beyond that timeframe, I'll let everyone know. Thanks for your patience while we work to make the BoC Community a better place to play!
Thats what puzzles me about managed hosting though... with most datacenters (and I know NFO is not a datacenter, only a reseller), a manager server still means you have all the freedoms, your just paying extra for the support, 24X7 monitoring, and automatic updates. I don't see why they would restrict you from SSH or the liberty to install whatever the hell you want..
"Managed" in this case means something different than it does in the dedicated machine arena for people wanting to host web services. For a GSP, it means that they handle the administration of the machine, the installation of the game servers, the tweaks and other goodies... and you just set up the servers. Also, the homos who wrote the Call of Duty games, and now the jerks behind the Battlefield games are making it so that only approved GSPs are allowed to see the binaries for the dedicated server installs. Customers are not allowed to modify them. This is the game developer's way of forcing the game that cost you $60 to get stale and boring after a while, because modders can't extend the game to make it interesting again. That means you have to buy the next shitty game they put out. If you have a managed server, then you basically get to leverage your hardware to host one of these game servers that people with a normal dedi can't host without paying the normal per-slot fee in addition to their dedi fee.
