The Average Life Spawn Of A Server?

[Anti-Static Foam Cleaner]

It's called a job.

[Tira]

As for server costs - it highly depends on the population of the server, since this is directly related to how much you can expect to pay per month. However, you'd be surprised at the goodwill of many players. I don't have any donation items per se, and I make easily more than enough to cover my server costs (about $300 per month) nonetheless - which is why I mostly consider the majority of "donation" systems to be greed on the part of server owners and not much else. The only incentives that donators are given is the option to have a custom drooping doll based on one of their characters made exclusively for them (which is stat-free, so just a vanity item), which has proved highly popular - example:



I can tell you for a fact that without donations I wouldn't be able to support the server for long (the amount it costs per month equates to about half my monthly rent), although I'd still give it a damn good shot.

However, having said all this - no one should START a server if they can't cover the initial server costs, and are expecting to rely on player donations from the word go. When I first started out, server costs were equating to around $70 per month (and fortunately this doesn't equate to much in this country, as the currency is much stronger), which I could easily cover myself, regardless of donations. It wasn't until costs starting hitting $200+ that I came to be quite reliant on the players.

This is sort of off-topic though, since this is meant to be about average life span. To be honest, I'd say not long - the server turnover these days is incredible (mostly because any idiot can slap a pre-compiled eA onto a server and call him or herself a server owner). Average uptime is probably (sadly) around two to three months at most.

[Denia]

I can say my server's costs are about my full time job's salary after taxes. If I were to try to pay for it using my salary and purely my salary, I wouldn't have a home or would need to be living with my parents in order to do that. And I make more than the average person in California.

Even if they have jobs, they can't always pay for it, stuff happens.

[Anti-Static Foam Cleaner]

What server do you run to have such humongous costs?

[Denia]

An Aegis one with 6 (and growing when donations allow it and there is a need for more) dedicated servers (top of the line, 100mbit).

[Anti-Static Foam Cleaner]

Well excuuuuuuse me, princess, you're an exception proving the rule then...

[Johnsu89]

Well excuuuuuuse me, princess, you're an exception proving the rule then...

Dont flame. >:

[Guest]

>.> play nice ppl or else ima poke u

[Anti-Static Foam Cleaner]

Dont flame. >:

I'm not.

[Leon.H]

About Server costs.
For my server project i already rented a Web Server & A server for the emulator able to support Huge traffic & 1200 Players. bandwith & Spec wise, and i'm no noob at this!
Both of them cost 200 Euros. 36 E for Webserver & The rest for the game serv.

If you are experienced in the IT Commercial field then you will easily find a secure & stable host at an affordable price.
And then if you're not, asking in specialized communities will always help .

For example, many of you never thought of getting a server in another country other than your own. A country where VAT on IT is a lot lower than in other places & where Server Hosting is already well developed at a cheaper price.

Let's compare for example France & UK and US

Getting hosting in UK is pure full fledged suicide, the prices are too High & same for the currency.along with their outrageous V.A.T
but the service is great or so they say.
Compared to France where you can get traffic unlimited servers for as cheap as 19 euros with an decent to excellent service.
US has the best machines but trust me, their service bandwidth wise is a serious scam. Over use of bandwidth, they will never hesitate in sharing a 100mbps poorly configured port with 16 users ; or s*** you with side offers or setup costs :q

[Anti-Static Foam Cleaner]

Netherlands?

[Tira]

You're only thinking about costs - think about physical location of majority of players versus server location.

I live in the UK. My server is located in the US. To be honest, in terms of cost, this works out well - since the dollar is particularly weak the last year or so, so essentially it's half (or less) what I'd pay here. But even if this weren't the case, I'd still likely go with a US host - I'd hazard a guess that 70%+ of my server population is located in US/Canada/South America, and they're not gonna appreciate the ping to a server located 10,000+ miles away.