Hosting a Minecraft Server On Linode

The planets have aligned again and I've been back to Minecraft. Every now and then I get the urge to contact a few friends and create a server and spend a few hours each week building crazy things and fighting for survival in a blocky world. Usually, I host the server on my laptop. However, this time I wanted to do something different (read more complicated). I'm a developer and I have the power of cloud at my fingertips, so why not set up a Linode instance and host the server there?

My Linode instance was already set to host the server, so I decided to use it the first night. Although it is able to run a static site with a 1GB RAM machine but it's not equipped to run an online gaming server. If you'd like the server to crash constantly, and be unable to run on memory, then this is the strategy you should consider

Linode's 4 core and 4GB memory instances are recommended if you intend to play the game. It's enough unless you intend to host a lot of people at once. The most appealing thing is that these instances cost $0.06/hr. Last night I played with a buddy for 4 hours and it cost me 24Cper hour.

I've written a shell script to do the installation for me and even sign the EULA. So , now whenever I want to play with some friends, I can click a whole three buttons in Linode's administrator panel, connect via SSH to the server, execute my script and start playing. After we're done, I can copy the entire world to my Mac through FTP and close the instance.  healthhuman.net Simple, inexpensive and quick.