aha, a minecraft server. yeah i did this. first things first. whats your internet connection like? you have a good
upload speed with low latency?
ideally you want a dedicated physical PC, or virtual windows/linux instance, per game server being hosted. again, be it physical, or virtual. That way the underlying core OS hosting doesn't become the bottleneck as it won't be servicing requests from other big programs running, that may cause lag or latency in your game. you literally have your windows or linux, purely focused on servicing that game environment.
initially i thought i could just host a virtual machine on my storage server, as it had ram and CPU cycles/cache to spare, so i thought.
AMD PhenomII x6 T1055 + 8gig DDR2 800
It worked, but was a bit glitchy and laggy and didn't like lots of users (5+) or large ingame view distances. it wasn't ideal, but it "didn't cost anyone anything".
I wanted to play about with live video transcoding on my storage server, so i wanted to free up it's cpu resources, and there was a black Friday deal going on with AMD kit,
So picked up an mATX AM3 board with 32gig DDR3 1600, and an AMD 8350 cpu which was just out at the time.
Also landed a pile of SSD's for a £10 each (another story), so 8 of those went into it.
installed windows server2012 hyper-v "core" edition (free), and migrated the minecraft Virtual Machine into the new hyper-v environment.
each VM was sat on it's own dedicated SSD seperate from the primary OS drive. big win in performance. DDR3 vs DDR2 ram, another big performance win.
even though it was "only minecraft" i ended up allocating 4 cpu's and 16gig of ram to the virtual machine running the minecraft server software. basically with all of the glitching and performance issues fixed, people had gone crazy, and the world was now huge. plus it'd have about 10-20 people on there in the evenings.
i also investigated professional server hosting and control software rather than running the basic java minecraft server, and went with "McMyAdmin" by M-Cubed
https://www.mcmyadmin.com/
this allowed much more control, with anti-griefing abilities you can add in or disable as you like, regular "world backups", users you can assign various amounts of control, not only to the game world, but the server system hosting the game, and even a control panel you can have on your phone. so you don't need to be in the server or the game to say, change the weather, switch from night to day, kick or block or whitelist users.
it seems that most "dedicated servers" you can run for games have this or at least the ability to be controlled and maintained by something - so that may be worth investigating.
that machine ran for about 2 years 24/7
so. dedicated machine - either physical or virtual, per game server, and run it off an SSD, keep an eye on your ram - if it's a VM, do NOT run dynamic ram, as it'll kick off all your connected users everytime it re-jigs how much ram it has. and if it's a minecraft server, do NOT let people modify the "game ticks". it's supposed to have 3 per second, and it controls the speed of in game things, from enemy AI, to how fast crops and plants grow. someone changed the ticks on my game server to 30,000 per second. i only figured it out when people were saying the game was now a tiny bit glitchy, and the CPU cores were maxing out at 100%. i asked the game admins what they had done and i had one guy admit he wanted instant food when he planted seeds.
so be careful what you give people access to do.
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