MUD hosting -- good? bad? or maybe EC2?

[janua]

I'm thinking of getting a host because I'm almost ready to get a few more people involved in this little project of mine. Looking at the hosts out there, only a couple of names are familiar. I was hosted with Wolfpaw back in the 90s, but holy cow their prices are high now. Looks like they have specialized in the big MUDs.

I also used Envy for a while and they were reputable. Has anyone heard any recent info about them?

Does anyone have another host they really like? Or one they really don't like?

Also, I remember reading some resource stats that Crat posted, but I don't remember where. (I'm on total information overload at this point.) Can someone point me to that? Are the resource requirements all that different for an LPMud (Dead Souls, probably) than for a Diku-derivative?

Has anyone looked into (or maybe even tried) an Amazon EC2 instance? That could be really interesting.

[vexcesban]

If my internet connection didn't drop in and out randomly I would host my mud myself, however I have used a few hosting sites.

The 2 still in existance are:

http://www.genesismuds.com/
http://support.thirdhosting.com/index.php

I currently use the second and don't recall any issues with either, in fact on both occasions I had them install a specific version of gcc for me and both were/are professional.

Im running a h7 lib 100% modified with ldmud 3.2 and my mud doesn't require much resources at all, and only takes up about 250 mb of disk space so I couldn't help you there.

[janua]

Hey thanks, Vex. Maybe I'll give Genesis a shot. No setup fee, cheap monthly price, and they are located pretty close to me. Can't hurt to try them out for development.

I'm still curious about other hosts and EC2, or similar, for the long-run.

[Sluggy]

A VPS host is probably the better way to go.  Most mud hosts are a joke and even the competitive ones usually don't compare well to a VPS in terms of resources vs price. The only downside is that you'll have to do all the OS/security/backup setup yourself. But you also get unlimited access to your virtual machine.

[chaos]

Due to my belief that LPMuds generally need adequate I/O performance, I doubt EC2 will do that well for the purpose.  Feel free to prove me wrong and let us know, though.

[Camlorn]

Well, one word of advice. EC2 is probably overkill.  As for needing good i/o performance, that depends.  I'd not go EC2 for a number of reasons, and i/o isn't the big one: mostly, the providers (at least those I looked at) want your app to be written for their server and provide special file services (pay extra).  On amazon's, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, you also have to pay for storage and use a special api; the problem here is that said api doesn't match the c api for file i/o.  I don't know for sure, but I could see a lot of difficulties in getting it to work; it'll run, yes, but when the instance gets rebooted, the hard drive gets erased in some cases.

    To be truthful, getting a vps, about $10-$20 per month, is probably more than sufficient; you have to know how to administrate it, though.  Lpmuds, by modern standards (if you're not chaos--go see lost souls sometime right after reboot) really don't use too much