Comments on: Hosting a Game Server on AWS Two sort of answers: - Ping times from Spain to a micro EC2 instance in the us-east-1 region are around 133 round-trip. - Micro instances (the kind supported by free tier) are not a good idea for any sort of real-time serving. When the hypervisor responsible for sharing them detects a few seconds of usage spike, it may block the CPU for an equivalent amount of time. An example of a usage spike would be more than 2 threads actively using the CPU or network for 5 seconds. I work daily with EC2 and love it. Another alternative for cheap game server is google AppEngine. Noel Llopis wrote a couple of good articles here: http://gamesfromwithin.com/life-in-the-top-100-and-the-google-app-engine Two sort of answers:

- Ping times from Spain to a micro EC2 instance in the us-east-1 region are around 133 round-trip.

- Micro instances (the kind supported by free tier) are not a good idea for any sort of real-time serving. When the hypervisor responsible for sharing them detects a few seconds of usage spike, it may block the CPU for an equivalent amount of time. An example of a usage spike would be more than 2 threads actively using the CPU or network for 5 seconds.

I work daily with EC2 and love it. Another alternative for cheap game server is google AppEngine. Noel Llopis wrote a couple of good articles here: Nice article! This sounds very interesting indeed! The latencies worry me too, especially if players are located in Europe or Asia. I wonder if I could run a little Minecraft server in their free tier, but I'm not sure if 15GB of monthly bandwidth is enough. If you do any latency testing, be sure to report your results for all world to see :) Nice article!

This sounds very interesting indeed! The latencies worry me too, especially if players are located in Europe or Asia. I wonder if I could run a little Minecraft server in their free tier, but I’m not sure if 15GB of monthly bandwidth is enough.

If you do any latency testing, be sure to report your results for all world to see :)

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By: Richard Fine/2011/05/08/hosting-a-game-server-on-aws/#comment-3700 Richard Fine Sun, 08 May 2011 12:50:07 +0000 kinda. The enemies produce some nice “AAAARGH!” reactions from players, even when I never got around to implementing damage/death for the player – so they’re ultimately harmless but they still freak people out :D

]]> By: Richard Fine/2011/05/08/hosting-a-game-server-on-aws/#comment-3699 Richard Fine Sun, 08 May 2011 12:46:59 +0000 I'm very interested in this. Thanks for the introduction/overview to AWS. Did you end up getting the prototype to a playable state? I’m very interested in this. Thanks for the introduction/overview to AWS. Did you end up getting the prototype to a playable state?

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By: Federico Ravasio/2011/05/08/hosting-a-game-server-on-aws/#comment-3692 Federico Ravasio Sun, 08 May 2011 09:33:25 +0000