http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums ... _id=359328
This is from a discussion that took place after the Austin Game Conference between a developer and a hosting provider talking about costs for hosting & setting up an MMO.
As I've mentioned previously, bandwidth and servers are not cheap - the bandwidth rate that is mentioned here is if you are committing to a serious amount of bandwidth - ie you pay that much irregardless of whether you do less or not.
If you call any hosting company and ask them about bandwidth costs, you'll find that these rates are actually low from what i would estimate.
Anyways, here it is:
25 Servers
- You will probably need three tiers of server - Game / Web / DB
The game and web servers, for the purposes of this conversation, balance out at around $325 - $350 per month including colo, power, tier one support. The DB servers (4GB RAM + Fiber Channel Card for SAN Storage or RAID 5 multiple drives) are usually closer to $1000 a month - so you need to determine how many DB servers you need in that 25 server stack. As I mentioned, if you look at 1U servers you also need to figure in switches (Cisco 3650 or similar). You don't need switching with the blade centers, but if you plan to do hardware load balancing (Layer 7 switching) we would have to figure that in too. A dedicated firewall for 40 - 60 Megs of traffic would be ABOUT $350 a month, assuming not all traffic needs to be secure. But roughly, if we say you have 20 game / web servers plus 5 DB servers, you're at
20 x 350 = $7000
5 x 900 = $4500
= $11500 for your hardware, so your $6500 is not realistic. - but the above represents around $150k of hardware before you start looking at colocation, support, warranties, replacement, finance charges, cables, installation etc.
60 Mbps at our standard rate is billed at $75 per Mbps so = $4500 ( I would say that 60 Mbps is low for 25 game servers - more like 150 Mbps @ $70 = $10500). So your bandwidth estimate is closer.
But assuming 60 Mbps,
Hardware: $11500
Bandwidth: $4500
TOTAL = $16,000 per month.
To put this into context, if your game is running 20 game servers, with 500 users per server, this would be give you the means to support 10,000 concurrent users. We usually work on the premise that 30% of your subscriber base will be online at any one time (although it's probably more likely to be 15% or so). At 30%, your 10,000 concurrent users would mean 30,000 subscribers, so if they are paying you $10 a month, you have revenues of $300,000 per month. $16,000 for your infrastucture including 24/7 support (15 minute response guarantee) means 53 cents per user per month.
A couple of other key things to bear in mind.
- Your OS - if you are using anything other than a true open source OS such as Linux plus MySQL, you are going to be looking at something like $799 per game server (assuming Windows Server 2003 Standard) and between $3,000 and $6,000 per server if you use MSSQL Standard or Advanced for your DB's). So across 20 game servers and 5 DB servers, you would be looking at $30,000 in upfront DB costs at a minimum. Higher end games use a commercial DB solution, such as Informix or Oracle, but in the case of Informix, this means $56,000 per CPU (so if you have five dual cpu boxes running your DB, that's $560,000 for your DB software). Oracle runs into the millions of $. SO - we do suggest looking very closely at open source solutions for your servers and DB architecture.
- Storage
We have a 32TB Fiber Channel SAN storage available, and we find this is the best solution to backup large data sets such as your customer / account / character DB. To all extents and purposes it's the same as RAID 5, except you get muvch better redundancy, reliablity and speed (there's 2GB of front end cache on the SAN as opposed to a MAX of 128MB, usually 16MB on regular SCSI HDD. If you look at our price list, you can see what we charge for SAN storage - down to around $1.00 per GB per month. So if you're backing up 1TB of data, it's going to cost around $4000 per month. This is preferable to building your own mass storage solution eg the SAN costs around 1.2 million (you can do it more cheaply but then the reliablity suffers).
SO
Overall costing assuming open source architecture - I'll actually assume 100Mbps connection.
HARDWARE: $11500
BANDWIDTH : $7000
STORAGE (assume 1TB): $4000
= $22500
which at our 30,000 subscriber level is around 75 cents per user from a $10.
As I mentioned in Austin, this is all highly reliable and redundant infrastructure, with a multi-homed Tier 1 carrier network. You will find cheaper options, but the key differences will be lack of reliablity and scalability, additional support and warranty costs, ultimately a higher rate of network failure. Our aim is to be the most attractive, cost effective quality option.
