The story of creating a successful game hosting project
Greetings to all habrazhiteli!
In the light of the popularization of the topic of IT-biographies and the positive attitude of the community to articles about successful endeavors, I hasten to share the story of the creation of my Minecraft hosting.
This topic is quite specialized and may seem frivolous, but this post is based on really existing facts. In other words, I want to tell my story about how to realize myself without relying on trends. This is a rewritten and updated post.
')
The key to starting a business in the hosting industry, of course, was my long experience in the administration of * nix-systems. Before that, I had to keep several medium-sized projects in the blogosphere and I was well acquainted with the ins and outs of system administration.
It is worth mentioning that gaming servers today, though not advertised so vigorously, as it was a few years ago, but have regular customers and live well.
By demanding Minecraft resources, it is significantly inferior to the same Lineage, and therefore allows me to deploy several accounts from a small dedicated server with complete peace of mind for the welfare of clients.
In terms of its popularity, the toy has long crossed the threshold of 30 million users and continues to gain momentum to this day. Due to the availability and a large number of minor audience, as well as in connection with the economically-oriented game bias, the idea of ​​internal monetization here goes "with a bang." However, there were a lot of hosting companies providing similar services and they all had one thing - they all limit the client to linking resources to slots.
Therefore, a different path was chosen. It was decided not to limit slots, but to limit resources, while maintaining the low cost of services, moreover, to deploy all this on the basis of a Russian location. Create a monopoly on the Russian market for such services. Such conditions very quickly attracted customers, and a week later we became quite popular.
One of the main problems, of course, is a little customer awareness of what they are buying and how it all works. Despite the detailed instructions on the site and the available technical support, the same questions constantly arise related to the banal inability to read manuals. It is also possible to attribute the negative problems to top-priority issues that competitors have poured on us, trying to constantly convict us of fraud, thus confusing clients.
Moreover, customers tend to be skeptical of the young hosting. The presence of the SSL certificate and the history of the project, which was available to everyone, did not inspire confidence in them. Many believe in the true location of the servers only after providing a test server. In general, the bulk of hosting is satisfied.
Like many other similar projects, we have repeatedly encountered DDoS attacks. It was just someone's attempts to spoil or attack was carried out on behalf of competitors - is unknown. However, our admins successfully cope with such incidents. Servers are stable, clients are satisfied. On the basis of data centers, we use hardware filtering systems for traffic, and we proxify our own site through several large communication centers where we manually cut “bad” traffic using nginx.
It happened historically. The project took its start from a closed community (abcd.bz), where it was proposed to organize such a service. Among the participants was found the one who offered the first server to start (namely, Valentin Gostev, director of le.lc, for which he thanks a lot). Thanks to this, the start cost only $ 200 (buying a server and software licenses). By the way, there were also future investors who later invested in the purchase of server hardware.
At the moment, the server part is represented by the following configurations:
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670 / 128 GB RAM / raid 5 on SSD / 1 Gbps network
4 x Intel Xeon E5-4607 / 512 GB RAM / raid 5 on SSD / 1 Gbps network
We use billing from WHMCS, it is certainly not a cake at all, for October alone there were so many security patches released, but there is no choice, until we develop our own billing. As the control panel, the master node is used - multicraft, slightly rewritten for itself and hung with additional buns and protection mechanisms. I will not consider the installation and configuration process, because this is not a manual.
The unique “boxed” services include daily full backup of user data on your own SAN, free web hosting for clients (for the server site / DB / etc), and even that we do not limit slots, leaving the client to decide how many slots to install . Many will say that this is the first step towards an oversell - but no, it is not. We severely limit the physical resources of the account to quotas, as they say - you can’t jump higher than the ceiling, if the client complains about lags - check whether the tariff plan that he ordered is in line with his requests, and then we decide to increase the tariff, or optimize the build. Many people order the cheapest fare, install 100,500 slots and leaky assemblies with leak errors, after which they complain and leave tons of negative reviews, but we even successfully solve such problems.
In billing, there are always online 1 or more technical support specialists who work daily with the server part of minecraft and help clients solve their questions and problems.
We temporarily cooperate with a third-party payment system, we are now undergoing certification and verification to start accepting funds without intermediaries, thus users will not have to pay extra fees.
In the future, it is planned to increase client conversion and the quality of the hosting itself by optimizing resources and purchasing new, more powerful equipment. In the near future, new, previously unrealized services are expected to launch, such as protecting user resources from bots attacks and connecting a domain as a server address without specifying its port, a certain proxy server (roughly speaking), which will be included in the basic cost of services.
I attach graphic reports for September, October and November as confirmation of the fact that this project is really successful and has prospects. True, as can be seen from the graphs, November was still not very successful.
It was a brief outline of the development of the project in the field of IT, for the implementation of which we used only our own knowledge, a small start-up capital and a desire to improve our own skills in the field of administration. Of course, the project is not at all innovative, but it clearly demonstrates the possibility of organizing your own business with minimal resources, availability of enthusiasm and ingenuity. The link to the project itself is gamehost.abcd.bz .
I wish you success in your projects!
Thank you for your attention.
In the light of the popularization of the topic of IT-biographies and the positive attitude of the community to articles about successful endeavors, I hasten to share the story of the creation of my Minecraft hosting.
This topic is quite specialized and may seem frivolous, but this post is based on really existing facts. In other words, I want to tell my story about how to realize myself without relying on trends. This is a rewritten and updated post.
')
Why hosting?
The key to starting a business in the hosting industry, of course, was my long experience in the administration of * nix-systems. Before that, I had to keep several medium-sized projects in the blogosphere and I was well acquainted with the ins and outs of system administration.
It is worth mentioning that gaming servers today, though not advertised so vigorously, as it was a few years ago, but have regular customers and live well.
Why Minecraft?
By demanding Minecraft resources, it is significantly inferior to the same Lineage, and therefore allows me to deploy several accounts from a small dedicated server with complete peace of mind for the welfare of clients.
In terms of its popularity, the toy has long crossed the threshold of 30 million users and continues to gain momentum to this day. Due to the availability and a large number of minor audience, as well as in connection with the economically-oriented game bias, the idea of ​​internal monetization here goes "with a bang." However, there were a lot of hosting companies providing similar services and they all had one thing - they all limit the client to linking resources to slots.
Therefore, a different path was chosen. It was decided not to limit slots, but to limit resources, while maintaining the low cost of services, moreover, to deploy all this on the basis of a Russian location. Create a monopoly on the Russian market for such services. Such conditions very quickly attracted customers, and a week later we became quite popular.
What are the problems?
One of the main problems, of course, is a little customer awareness of what they are buying and how it all works. Despite the detailed instructions on the site and the available technical support, the same questions constantly arise related to the banal inability to read manuals. It is also possible to attribute the negative problems to top-priority issues that competitors have poured on us, trying to constantly convict us of fraud, thus confusing clients.
Moreover, customers tend to be skeptical of the young hosting. The presence of the SSL certificate and the history of the project, which was available to everyone, did not inspire confidence in them. Many believe in the true location of the servers only after providing a test server. In general, the bulk of hosting is satisfied.
Like many other similar projects, we have repeatedly encountered DDoS attacks. It was just someone's attempts to spoil or attack was carried out on behalf of competitors - is unknown. However, our admins successfully cope with such incidents. Servers are stable, clients are satisfied. On the basis of data centers, we use hardware filtering systems for traffic, and we proxify our own site through several large communication centers where we manually cut “bad” traffic using nginx.
Why are you on the subdomain?
It happened historically. The project took its start from a closed community (abcd.bz), where it was proposed to organize such a service. Among the participants was found the one who offered the first server to start (namely, Valentin Gostev, director of le.lc, for which he thanks a lot). Thanks to this, the start cost only $ 200 (buying a server and software licenses). By the way, there were also future investors who later invested in the purchase of server hardware.
How it works?
At the moment, the server part is represented by the following configurations:
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670 / 128 GB RAM / raid 5 on SSD / 1 Gbps network
4 x Intel Xeon E5-4607 / 512 GB RAM / raid 5 on SSD / 1 Gbps network
We use billing from WHMCS, it is certainly not a cake at all, for October alone there were so many security patches released, but there is no choice, until we develop our own billing. As the control panel, the master node is used - multicraft, slightly rewritten for itself and hung with additional buns and protection mechanisms. I will not consider the installation and configuration process, because this is not a manual.
The unique “boxed” services include daily full backup of user data on your own SAN, free web hosting for clients (for the server site / DB / etc), and even that we do not limit slots, leaving the client to decide how many slots to install . Many will say that this is the first step towards an oversell - but no, it is not. We severely limit the physical resources of the account to quotas, as they say - you can’t jump higher than the ceiling, if the client complains about lags - check whether the tariff plan that he ordered is in line with his requests, and then we decide to increase the tariff, or optimize the build. Many people order the cheapest fare, install 100,500 slots and leaky assemblies with leak errors, after which they complain and leave tons of negative reviews, but we even successfully solve such problems.
In billing, there are always online 1 or more technical support specialists who work daily with the server part of minecraft and help clients solve their questions and problems.
We temporarily cooperate with a third-party payment system, we are now undergoing certification and verification to start accepting funds without intermediaries, thus users will not have to pay extra fees.
In the future, it is planned to increase client conversion and the quality of the hosting itself by optimizing resources and purchasing new, more powerful equipment. In the near future, new, previously unrealized services are expected to launch, such as protecting user resources from bots attacks and connecting a domain as a server address without specifying its port, a certain proxy server (roughly speaking), which will be included in the basic cost of services.
I attach graphic reports for September, October and November as confirmation of the fact that this project is really successful and has prospects. True, as can be seen from the graphs, November was still not very successful.
Why did I even read all this?
It was a brief outline of the development of the project in the field of IT, for the implementation of which we used only our own knowledge, a small start-up capital and a desire to improve our own skills in the field of administration. Of course, the project is not at all innovative, but it clearly demonstrates the possibility of organizing your own business with minimal resources, availability of enthusiasm and ingenuity. The link to the project itself is gamehost.abcd.bz .
I wish you success in your projects!
Thank you for your attention.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/204304/
All Articles