When I first started FaceWAN, I was still in high school and the year was 2005. The GMod9 servers and website were hosted on old hardware off my home DSL connection at a whopping 1.5Mbps up and down. Some of my best friends including Chicken132 and Mr. Bojangles really helped launch the community, which I'm very grateful for giving me the idea and hosting servers in addition to mine. This had no cost attached to it other than the internet connection, and the little power those Pentium servers used. Some years later in 2007, I co-located the servers to a local datacenter on the East Coast US with a faster connection at no cost. Fast forward to around 2010 when we got hit with a wave of DDoS attacks on the Counter-Strike: Source servers and the newly launched HL2 RP server for GMod that took a good portion of Boston's routers down for the morning. This caused me to scramble to find a solution that can block these attacks without causing interruptions. After asking around, I was pointed to Awknet by a lot of people, but the big disadvantage was Awknet only had servers in LA (West Coast US!) This was quite an issue because most of the players at the time (including me) were on the East Coast and pings would increase +60ms. After seeing a price of $120/month and wanting the community to thrive without advertisements or pay to win mechanics, I ate the monthly cost to keep things running and things continued to thrive, just with different player demographics. I expected no compensation and just wanted a place for my friends to relax and have fun playing games together. Then 2014 rolled around, and I found OVH built a datacenter on the East Coast of Canada and had servers for the same price. I jumped at the opportunity to bring the servers back to the East Coast, switched from Awknet to OVH, and things continued to move along with me paying $120/month out of pocket. After a few years in 2016, FaceWAN quickly hit capacity and I upgraded to a better server for double the price at $238/month, continuing to pay out of pocket for the community. I tried adding paid adminship to at least make it less I'm paying per month, and that was a total fail I regret even trying. I continued to pay out of pocket until 2021, which is when I started up FaceServers and started selling game servers. The cost of the infrastructure went up each year until the beginning of 2023, which OVH had me paying $652/month between dedicated servers and IP space! TL;DR So now we are at the present day, and in the past few months, we have completely moved away from our previous hosting provider of many years (OVH) for US servers due to major price inflation and stability/reliability issues with their services since December of last year. In the last few months, I have spent a lot of time getting our new infrastructure built, shipped out and lit up at the current datacenter in the East Coast US (Virginia). We now have co-located hardware (like back in 2007), which is way more powerful than what we had with OVH. Our operating cost has now gone down to a little under $300/month with an upfront cost on the hardware of $4500 with room for expansion. I know its a flip from my previous statements of renting being cheaper than colo, but at the start of 2023, OVH prices went way up, and its no longer feasible to rent dedicated hardware. We also now have a dedicated hardware firewall/router and 10gbps uplink from CosmicGuard for DDoS protection. Another huge advantage with the new hardware is that we can do proper HA and redundancy which wasn't possible with OVH. As of last week, all services in the US/Canada have been moved to this new location in Virginia on the East Coast of the US. Migration has been completed from OVH to CosmicGuard and the IPs were updated everywhere accordingly, so please make sure to update your favorites/bookmarks if you still have the old IPs! You may have noticed, we currently still have a dedicated server in Central EU with OVH and Co-located space in London with CosmicGuard is planned to replace this server, so stay tuned in the coming months for more info. As always, if you have any questions or want to chat, feel free to drop by the Discord and let us know.
