Ahoyworld is calling all of you to arms to fight a common enemy called 'Hardware ageing' !!
Our Current Situation
At Ahoyworld we are currently running flagship server on:
Intel Core i7-3930k Hexa Core
64 GB DDR3 RAM
2x 3 TB SATA III HD
Which Covers:
EU#1 EU#2 EU#4 EU#5 and TeamSpeak.
Now while this might have been top of the line back in the days this is slowly getting dated, soon we will not be able to keep this running for much longer, not without having to cut back on the amount of available game servers, Thus risk losing slot capacity or cutting the number of supported games. This is the reverse world, as since AW is growing we are actually looking to expand the amount of fun on our server, not cut back on them.
Over the past 3 years the AW landscape has changed, the membership has grown significantly, and the requirements for gaming servers has also gone up. Not only up, we also see that the shift to high capacity servers is still growing as expected.
As a side note we also own:
Valiant Server
AWE EU#6 and EU#9
Intel® Core™ i7-6700 Quad-Core Skylake (incl. Hyper-Threading Technology)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4 RAM
Hard Drive: 2 x 250 GB SATA 6 Gb/s SSD (Software-RAID 1)
Connection: 1 Gbit/s-Port Guaranteed Bandwidth: 1 Gbit/s
Traffic: 30 TB
What We Are Planning
We can already say that this will have a big impact on how we will do our server-planning from now on. The way things look now we will move away from Flagships massive server and for the same amount of money we will rent several smaller units instead:
Intel® Core™ i7-6700 Quad-Core Skylake (incl. Hyper-Threading Technology)
RAM: 64 GB DDR4 RAM
Hard Drive: 2 x 250 GB SATA 6 Gb/s SSD (Software-RAID 1)
Connection: 1 Gbit/s-Port Guaranteed Bandwidth: 1 Gbit/s
Traffic: 30 TB
Intel® Core™ i7-6700 Quad-Core Skylake (incl. Hyper-Threading Technology)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4 RAM
Hard Drive: 2 x 250 GB SATA 6 Gb/s SSD (Software-RAID 1)
Connection: 1 Gbit/s-Port Guaranteed Bandwidth: 1 Gbit/s
Traffic: 30 TB
This is what we Plan to do
TS -Flag 1
EU1 - Flag 1
EU2 - New Server
EU3 - Valiant
EU4 - Flag 1
EU5 - New Server
EU6 - Valiant
EU9 -Valiant
For those of you that know a little about computer hardware you will notice 2 things:
1 - This is not the professional server hardware like Xeon, Hexacore, dual CPU, etc..
2 - Though less cores these little servers have higher CPU frequency and are actually close to the same power as our current older machines.
Explain 1:
Not running Xeon-awesome-super-duper-mastermind-takeovertheworld server hardware reduces the cost by...well A LOT so we can have more for the same price. Allowing us to obtain our own Windows consumer-end licences, instead of the overpriced big-boy Server 2012 stuff.
Explain 2:
Moving away from a single-point-of-failure setup, to a way more flexible and scalable situation where we can get more servers up and running quickly and at a low cost. and in addition make better use of the available power. As you might know most of the software is not built to run on multi-core cpu's or even multi chip setups, leaving a lot of the power unused. With multiple smaller servers, we will be able to for example run a dedicated EU# machine with more players, or heavier maps and smoother AI and add any other additional servers with who knows how many slots.
Now What Can You Do?
Basically I will not avoid the obvious topic here: These things cost money, and we need that from YOU !
Though the price eventually will be similar, we cannot avoid the 1 month double running costs and in addition there are setup costs involved, together creating a hell of a monthly bill that would even make Santa Claus look pale
So as per above text, I hope you are confident we are not just wasting your valuable donations, but actually spending a lot of thought on our IT infrastructure before going to buy things we don't actually need.
The current donations are just about covering our daily running cost. And any additions like the REPO server (40 Euro per month) are currently covered from our own pockets. As you understand, this leaves us no room to obtain these extra servers, pay the setup costs, and run a double monthly bill until we migrated all the data & servers.
So we are looking for:
1 - MONEY, lots of hard cash to go get the migration going, and obtain these server rentals.
2 - Legal (second hand) windows licences. Anything from windows 7 to 10 pro to run as a base OS on these servers.
HOW ?
Paypal (preferred payment method!!) : https://forums.ahoyworld.net/donate/make-donation/
Above link will take you to our paypal donation page
Then at the Goal tab select server funds so we can differentiate between the two.
Windows licence:
Please send an email to legal at ahoyworld dot net with proof that your licence is official:
- Purchase bill
- Photo of your non-oem sticker, box or cd
- Make sure your licence code is included in the email
- Make sure your licence is not currently in use on any other computer
- Anything is welcome at this stage, just no Home-Editions (Windows 7, 8, 10, Even: Server 2008 or 2012)
NOTE: important that your licence is not OEM, ergo: not linked to specific hardware. Otherwise it will not work on our server (so please do not send us the old licence that came with your laptop\computer, those are all linked to that specific hardware)
Donation Target:
In total we need about £550 to complete the migration, and this is still without windows licences.
For now, we are looking to collect 3 windows licences in total. Legit cost of around £480
We will add another donation target on the website so you can see its progress live.
Once we have reached a certain amount we will complete phase 1, move EU#2 and #5 onto the 32GB server then
Phase 2 will involve transferring EU#1#4 and TeamSpeak onto the 64GB server.
A Massive Thanks From Us To YOU
We would like to thank our regular donators, you guys have kept AW running over the last 5 years or so !! well done !! without YOU we would not even be here today !
The same as above goes to our one-time donators, however big or small, thank you very much !!
We would also like to mention our staff, (often they are also donators in terms of money) that constantly offer their spare time to work on making the AW servers such a good place for your daily gaming needs. Time is often more worth than money, we should not forget this. In addition they often give-up their own gaming experience by constantly being on stand-by to help anyone of you players and sort out disputes and remove grievers. We appreciate the HUGE efforts of this group !!!
And finally the players that makes our servers such a nice place to be, it's you and your high quality gaming that attract the many new players we have boarded into our community over the last few years !!
TL;DR: In order to upgrade our server hardware, we need your money So please donate, every little helps.
