ArkTechHosting RSS Feed

Game Server Hosting Updae

꧁Jay꧂ — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 23:30:26 +0000

Hello all,

This is Soarin' / PiddleDip from ArkTechHosting making an announcement regarding the status of the host, I am happy to announce we have continued to host free servers since 2017 and though we publicly have not grew our presence, privately we have continued to host for people.

Today, I would like to publicly offer some free game hosting services for people who are interested, as before there is no monetary catch to the services- we have new machines and much better connection.

Servers are to be handed out in coming weeks, if you are interested in joining then please hop on over to the Discord server.

https://discord.gg/2UnsS3wAnu

Note:
This is built with Web3 & Blockchain tech in mind, this is to filter out bots and aid in the adoption of the Web3 future we are walking into.

Planned Downtime (Short)

꧁Jay꧂ — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 15:35:51 +0000

Hello!

There will be a short downtime (10~ minutes max if all goes well), you can learn more about it and a lot more future updates & releases by going to this URL:

https://trello.com/c/yzQaZqHT/22-update-xcp-ng-to-latest-patch-versions-arktechs-hypervisor

Join our Discord!
https://discord.gg/cYeuQh2

Edit: Servers are back up and functional, downtime logged was 2 minutes.

New Discord and Slowly Accepting Voice/Game Servers

꧁Jay꧂ — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 18:54:18 +0000

We've had the servers back up for the past few days and everyone has resumed back to normal.
After these large changes, I've gotten feedback from a couple users that the web panel (and especially file manager) is far more responsive, which as far as I know it wasn't that slow previously.

The changes done to ArkTech builds upon ArkTech's already not too bad uptime stats, I am aiming to move the SLA from 97% uptime to 99% uptime in these upcoming months.
I can now do much more frequent updates and bug testing before implementing updates, on top of that we have more data reliability & security with the new setup.

All changes went smoothly and we're back up, with a new theme for the panel too which was voted in by the clients.

I am slowly accepting servers again, you can join the Discord and ask for one or (recommended) sign up on the website and post there under "Request Hosting".

Official Discord of ArkTech Hosting
https://discord.gg/cYeuQh2

Planned Downtime & Major Notice

꧁Jay꧂ — Sun, 22 Sep 2019 01:39:02 +0000

The ArkTech machines will be completely wiped shortly, I've most of the active servers know prior and some of you I have done a short notice.

I've backed up all of the active servers, but I do recommend (like I've told everyone) to backup your own server too just incase my backups aren't perfect.

They will be down for a few hours or longer during this full reconstruction, that's why I haven't accepted any servers in the past few months. I've been waiting for people to get bored of running a GMod server and leave, just so I can do this major change without upsetting many people.

I'll let you know when everything is back up. Your previous logins may not work.

Planned Downtime June 22 2019

꧁Jay꧂ — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 03:08:53 +0000

Hello! There is planned downtime happening very shortly, I suspect something in our firewall in the datacenter is failing and we've requested it to be looked at. The people at the datacenter offered to do a hardware analysis and run diagnostics on it for us, this will cause short downtime.

I will update this post if I learn anything new.

Planned Downtime 10:30 PM Eastern

꧁Jay꧂ — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 23:55:54 +0000

Hello! There is planned downtime for an estimated hour, our drives for our new NAS arrived and so had our RAID controller. I need to flash the RAID controller to an HBA firmware to allow passthrough to our ZFS based NAS.

With the current motherboards I have available, they make me unable to flash the firmware however our firewall machine has a good chance of being the right type of BIOS to allow this process to happen. Unfortunately that means I have to take the firewall out and unhook it, which will take down the network however it will come back up when all is done.

Once the NAS is finished I am planning to allow long-term existing ArkTech server owners to have backup storage for their servers, I apologize in advance for the downtime and will hold off on the downtime if I see servers still populated. I will update this post if the downtime gets post-poned.
Thank you

Servers Back Up 2x

꧁Jay꧂ — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 02:08:44 +0000

During the planned maintenance right after taking the old UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) that was faulty out of the server room and plugging everything into just a surge protector (no batteries) I set the UPS on my lap and was filling out the warranty information.

I powered it on real quick to see what error it shot out and it just started to work, so I took the servers down again right after they went up to plug the main server machine into the back of the UPS and to my surprise it broke again and shot out an error. I plug everything back into my surge protector again and when I was testing the UPS further I noticed it could still power my aquarium, network switches, and fans no problem.
After further investigation the problem was the specific power supply on my server machine I was plugging into my UPS was faulty and it would make the UPS shoot out errors and not work.
After plugging in all the ArkTech server equipment (firewalls/switches/web servers/ game servers) into the back of it all except the broken power supply (it has two of them in a server) everything powered up perfectly fine and I plugged the UPS into the surge protector and everything seemed to have came back up.

That's a major relief as I was worried all of our UPSs were broken, after doing this maintenance and reorganizing all the wires in the server room I left it finding out both of our UPS units were working again. There shouldn't be anymore downtime until later this week around Tuesday or Wednesday due to getting a new network switch in for ArkTech.

Planned Downtime

꧁Jay꧂ — Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:46 +0000

ArkTechHosting will be having some short downtime, I'm going to be rewiring the server room and taking out the old battery backup/surge protector and get it replaced as it's still in warranty and it went faulty.

The downtime shouldn't be longer than 20-30 minutes, it'll start as soon as this announcement goes up.

Edit: Server are back up, downtime was 30 minutes

Panel Updating & Heads up

꧁Jay꧂ — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:57:56 +0000

Panel will be updating as of 11:00 AM Eastern, 2/22/2019

It's a couple versions out of date, doing updates on the Linux kernel itself too. Should only take around 20 minutes to complete everything,

There's also a new hardware upgrade coming to ArkTech coming this Sunday or Monday, it isn't the kind of upgrade where it'll improve performance of the servers but it's a step towards the direction of upgrading the entirety of ArkTech.
It's our new 48 port gigabit switch, there will be downtime for close to an hour or two. I'll try to do this in the morning hours on a school day so most of you don't notice the downtime, and I will post an announcement for when I do this.

Thank you and apologies for the upcoming downtime.

ArkTechHosting Plans

꧁Jay꧂ — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 18:56:26 +0000

In the last announcement I did a basic rundown with what's happening with ArkTechHosting, I was on a phone during that time and hadn't had my computer for nearly 2 months because I was out of state. Now that I'm home I'll expand further on the ideas I've got for ArkTech.
The expansion path I'm going for is going to be for the benefit of everybody, I'm still going to keep free servers without any catches like ads, playercount requirements, no support, and things alike. However, there will be paid plans that will be rolled out that give better performance, features, support, expansion paths for communities, and redundancy.

I'll explain more, first I'll write out the basic hardware I'm looking to get for ArkTech. I'll give each server machine a name.

Free Server Machine: (Pedro)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700(x) <-- Expected to be 12c 24t
RAM: 24-32GB DDR4 2666Mhz <-- Can be faster, depends on price.
HDD/SSD: 4x 2 TB HDD for mass storage with maybe a small 128GB SSD for caching, this way when a lot of servers are being turned on and off or map changes occur, then they'll load more off the SSD.

Paid Server Machine: (RPaul)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700(x) <-- Expected to be 12c 24t
RAM: 32GB DDR4 2666Mhz
Storage: 4-6+x 1TB SSD
NIC: 10Gbps SFP+ <--- For the file transfers

You'll see that the paid and free servers are the same CPU, there's a possibility this could change to a Ryzen 5 with 8c 16. The main difference is the free servers will only be able to have 25% of a single core dedicated to their server while a paid server can have up to 125% of a core.
With the CES 2019 display of AMD's suspected Ryzen 5 having the same performance as the i9-9900k while consuming around half the power consumption. With these new chips, power consumption is extremely important to me, I'll expand on that later.

If the new AMD chips are at the same performance as the i9-9900k, which I believe they'll be faster since the one that had the same performance as the i9-9900k was an engineering sample, there's still no set clocks and the chip itself isn't finished. But, let's say worst case scenario they do end up being teh same speed singlecore, that would still mean that 25% of a singlecore will still be a few % faster than the current ArkTech CPU's singlecore performance at 100%.
People will still be able to run 32 player servers on lighter gamemodes like Murder/PropHunt/Cinema/TTT/Deathrun/etc without experiencing lag, however Sandbox/DarkRP/SWRP/Nutscript/Spacebuild/etc that are heavier gamemodes might want to buy the 50%-125% plan which prices will be very fair.

Some benefits of paid hosting is planned to have a NAS so server owners get a certain about of GB dedicated to them to store their server backups on. I'm thinking of doing 25-50GB of storage to begin with as apart of the base plan, and can be expanded past that. 25GB can store months of backups of a GMod server if you backup the important files, not stuff like workshop addon cache and SRCDS files.
There may be free included web hosting, higher priority support, and of course the benefits of having the SSD server machine and more dedicated core usage of the CPU. There won't be 'Higher priority plans' that you can purchase for an extra few $ a month because the server machine will have dedicated space for each server, instead of packing the server with as many servers and overloading their nodes.

Those are the basic plans I've got, of course there's plenty more like the firewalls, networking behind it, security, storage redundancy and fault tolerance planning, but none of that is relevant to a consumer is why I haven't added it to this. Only things that the majority of consumers will be interested in has been added here.

If you've got any questions or concerns, I encourage you to reply to this post. This will be automatically forwarded to https://forums.arktechhosting.com/ in the Announcements subforum if you wish to reply there too.