08 Jan, 2008, Zeno wrote in the 2nd comment:
Added to http://mu.wikia.com/wiki/Free_MU%2A_Host...
:)
:)
10 Jan, 2008, Xalin wrote in the 3rd comment:
I've been hosted with Kaao a few times now and he has become a good friend of mine now. He is extremely easy to get a long with and tries is best to better the server for everyone as much as possible. If your looking for a host I would definately suggest him.
25 Jun, 2008, darkraider wrote in the 4th comment:
www.KaaoMUD.net does not seem to work anymore
23 Jul, 2008, Igabod wrote in the 5th comment:
I tried the www.kaaomud.net address as well and found it not working. is there a new address or what?
23 Jul, 2008, Fizban wrote in the 6th comment:
No, it closed several months ago.
26 Jul, 2008, Igabod wrote in the 7th comment:
why would somebody advertise free hosting and then shut down completely 6 months later? thats ridiculous.
26 Jul, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 8th comment:
You get what you pay for… it's really not all that surprising, is it?
26 Jul, 2008, Guest wrote in the 9th comment:
Igabod said:
why would somebody advertise free hosting and then shut down completely 6 months later? thats ridiculous.
No doubt they realized how expensive that can be and couldn't afford to keep it up. Offering free hosting is a very generous thing to do, but you have to pay for that bandwidth somehow. Which usually means they've got shell space somewhere in the form of a VPS, or even self-hosting at home. Having anything of any real use to outside users means having upload speed that's above the usual "normal" levels a residential line comes with. Some ISPs will even make you get a business class connection to support that. If the guys running KaaoMUD had no revenue stream to offset the costs that would have begun to hurt quickly.
29 Jul, 2008, Zeno wrote in the 10th comment:
Quote
No doubt they realized how expensive that can be and couldn't afford to keep it up
MUD hosting is expensive to run? Gotta disagree there.
29 Jul, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 11th comment:
Depending on your ISP, and the bandwidth of the MUDs you're hosting, yes, it can be expensive. There are also non-monetary costs, such as having to administer all of the stuff, and more importantly your personal bandwidth impinged upon by the people you're hosting (assuming you're hosting from home).
29 Jul, 2008, Guest wrote in the 12th comment:
Zeno said:
MUD hosting is expensive to run? Gotta disagree there.
Quote
No doubt they realized how expensive that can be and couldn't afford to keep it up
MUD hosting is expensive to run? Gotta disagree there.
If all you're counting is the immediate raw cost of the internet connection, then it depends on what kind of connection you're talking about. A free host isn't likely to be using an OC-48 backbone link. Or even a business class fiber optic line.
If however you factor in everything involved, servers, people to man them, electricity, bandwidth, co-location ( if you're using it ), VPS payments ( again, if you're using it ), etc. then those costs mount quickly. Your average person offering strictly free hosting often won't have the cash flow to sustain such a model for very long given all that's involved.
Ask around. Pretty much any host who will give you an honest answer will tell you that even paid hosting isn't profitable if that's all they offer. There's been plenty of pay hosts who have come and gone over the years. The real income comes from other services their companies offer, or from raw ad revenues generated by the website. Although Google has been making that harder and harder to live on lately.
31 Jul, 2008, Igabod wrote in the 13th comment:
Samson said:
If all you're counting is the immediate raw cost of the internet connection, then it depends on what kind of connection you're talking about. A free host isn't likely to be using an OC-48 backbone link. Or even a business class fiber optic line.
If however you factor in everything involved, servers, people to man them, electricity, bandwidth, co-location ( if you're using it ), VPS payments ( again, if you're using it ), etc. then those costs mount quickly. Your average person offering strictly free hosting often won't have the cash flow to sustain such a model for very long given all that's involved.
Ask around. Pretty much any host who will give you an honest answer will tell you that even paid hosting isn't profitable if that's all they offer. There's been plenty of pay hosts who have come and gone over the years. The real income comes from other services their companies offer, or from raw ad revenues generated by the website. Although Google has been making that harder and harder to live on lately.
Zeno said:
MUD hosting is expensive to run? Gotta disagree there.
Quote
No doubt they realized how expensive that can be and couldn't afford to keep it up
MUD hosting is expensive to run? Gotta disagree there.
If all you're counting is the immediate raw cost of the internet connection, then it depends on what kind of connection you're talking about. A free host isn't likely to be using an OC-48 backbone link. Or even a business class fiber optic line.
If however you factor in everything involved, servers, people to man them, electricity, bandwidth, co-location ( if you're using it ), VPS payments ( again, if you're using it ), etc. then those costs mount quickly. Your average person offering strictly free hosting often won't have the cash flow to sustain such a model for very long given all that's involved.
Ask around. Pretty much any host who will give you an honest answer will tell you that even paid hosting isn't profitable if that's all they offer. There's been plenty of pay hosts who have come and gone over the years. The real income comes from other services their companies offer, or from raw ad revenues generated by the website. Although Google has been making that harder and harder to live on lately.
I honestly had no idea there was that much to hosting muds… i just kinda figured it was a simple matter. Thank you for your input and for convincing me not to attempt to run a mud server.
31 Jul, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 14th comment:
Well, there's a difference between running one game server on somebody else's host, and being in charge of the host machine yourself. Samson was talking about the latter, which is indeed a lot more work than the former. Even the first isn't a walk in the park for various reasons, though.
31 Jul, 2008, Kline wrote in the 15th comment:
Yeah, I host my own games on my home Debian server without many issues. It has plenty of space, RAM, and spare CPU….But I have no dreams to ever offer free hosting. My cable upstream is only 50kb (far too small) and I just don't want the headaches of extra port forwarding (I use an awesome cheap home NAT router like most), support for code I probably don't know (Why won't it compile, help me please, I'm not paying you!), people wanting extra packages, certain versions of different packages (I get too many errors in GCC4, I want GCC3!) … It's just a headache. That's not even including outages from ISP, power, a random router on the path to some game owner's home, etc.
Kudos to those who step up and do provide a free home to others, and even to those (Samson :) that provide a reasonably priced one, as well.
Kudos to those who step up and do provide a free home to others, and even to those (Samson :) that provide a reasonably priced one, as well.
01 Aug, 2008, Guest wrote in the 16th comment:
DavidHaley said:
Well, there's a difference between running one game server on somebody else's host, and being in charge of the host machine yourself. Samson was talking about the latter, which is indeed a lot more work than the former. Even the first isn't a walk in the park for various reasons, though.
I'd wager running one game server on someone elses host still involves a lot more than you're letting on. Even then, the person in charge of the one server still has to maintain the OS, keep the apps updated, make sure people have what they need, possibly needs to have additional help to run the place since a single person does need to eat, sleep, have a life, etc.
What I do is more like this than running a full blown ISP level operation. I have two servers to keep up. I don't own any of the internet infrastructure behind it. But I do have to pay for the power to run it all and for the connection it all sits on, as well as air conditioning and power backup equipment to keep the things in reasonable condition. I'm the only one maintaining the hardware, OS, apps, support forums, customer database, and everything else. My raw cost for bandwidth is low enough to be paid for each month, but what little it does profit isn't enough to actually make an independent living on, nor does it completely cover the cost of even the power needs. The market for text game hosting simply won't bear the prices necessary to make a decent living from it. MUD admins simply won't pay the $100/month it would take to make it truly an independent offering. Even if it's hosted on datacenter level equipment.
01 Aug, 2008, Fizban wrote in the 17th comment:
I'd go the total opposite of David, running a mud takes more work than running a server. No question in my eyes. A successful mud nearly requires the administrators have no life.
01 Aug, 2008, Madiku wrote in the 18th comment:
Fizban said:
I'd go the total opposite of David, running a mud takes more work than running a server. No question in my eyes. A successful mud nearly requires the administrators have no life.
I have to call your flaw on there, It really doesn't take much work to keep a mud running, you exrtract, set up, and compile, then start up, and it'll run just fine. When it comes to doing coding, yea its work, but its not hard, its more that it just takes a lot of time and all the series of trial and error. To keep a server running, you have to make sure nothing is going over quota, you have to make sure all the systems are up to date, compiler for example. You have to maintain your OS and keep everything neat and clean. Not to mention the bandwidth bill, theres many factors when it comes to Hosting a server, and when it comes to setting that server up, its a lot more work then to set up a mud.
01 Aug, 2008, kiasyn wrote in the 19th comment:
Madiku said:
I have to call your flaw on there, It really doesn't take much work to keep a mud running, you exrtract, set up, and compile, then start up, and it'll run just fine. When it comes to doing coding, yea its work, but its not hard, its more that it just takes a lot of time and all the series of trial and error. To keep a server running, you have to make sure nothing is going over quota, you have to make sure all the systems are up to date, compiler for example. You have to maintain your OS and keep everything neat and clean. Not to mention the bandwidth bill, theres many factors when it comes to Hosting a server, and when it comes to setting that server up, its a lot more work then to set up a mud.
Fizban said:
I'd go the total opposite of David, running a mud takes more work than running a server. No question in my eyes. A successful mud nearly requires the administrators have no life.
I have to call your flaw on there, It really doesn't take much work to keep a mud running, you exrtract, set up, and compile, then start up, and it'll run just fine. When it comes to doing coding, yea its work, but its not hard, its more that it just takes a lot of time and all the series of trial and error. To keep a server running, you have to make sure nothing is going over quota, you have to make sure all the systems are up to date, compiler for example. You have to maintain your OS and keep everything neat and clean. Not to mention the bandwidth bill, theres many factors when it comes to Hosting a server, and when it comes to setting that server up, its a lot more work then to set up a mud.
he did say more work as opposed to harder work.
keeping systems up-to-date is generally fairly easy as well..
@daily apt-get update && apt-get upgrade | yes >/dev/null
gogo crontab. of course i wouldnt recommend that on a production server where you could break compatiability but hey :P
01 Aug, 2008, Igabod wrote in the 20th comment:
wow… i was talking about running a server, and i didn't even think about 80 percent of the things you guys mentioned… wow… my respect for all you hosts out there just went up a few notches. to think you guys do this as well as a full time job (in most cases) is just insane. I work 40 hours a week and barely have time for sleeping and (on my days off) get drunk. then again i tend to sleep for 9 or 10 hours a night but still you guys must be like energizer bunnies or something. I've run a mud before and it was a lil bit of work but at the time i was unemployed and really really addicted to mud so it wasn't all that difficult, then again, my mud never got more than 10 players on at a time so i didn't have that many people making insane demands of me.
Random Picks
I am Clayton also know as Kaao. I run KaaoMUD which is a Community Driven and free MUD, etc. hosting service. I also offer accounts which require a monthly donation where the money goes towards paying for/upgrading the current service. Although my service is relatively new I do offer rewards and account upgrades for those who remain active in the community at KaaoMUD.net (IRC, Forums, etc.). All free accounts include:
Disk Space: 150MB
Memory Allowance: 12Mb
Web space: /yourname URL
Control Panel: Usermin
Email: username@kaaomud.net
Shell Accounts: 1
So if you are in need of a host for your MU*/Website wither it be not even active yet or a larger mud with more demands. Drop by www.KaaoMUD.net. I’m sure we can offer what you’re looking for.