I've been lurking around the Linode site for the last few years and have always considered getting a Linode at some point so I can keep my websites and a game server in a single place and learn how to manage my own VPS/semi-dedicated box.

With that said, I am thinking about consolidating my websites that I have hosted on a reseller account elsewhere and a Minecraft with a shared MC game host provider into a 1 GB Linode package. Does anyone know if that would work? Is there documentation to help me set that up (I've had very little/no experience with a VPS/dedicated box)?

A little background:

I have 6 websites hosted on my reseller account that perhaps takes 3 GBs of storage and almost never eats more than 5 GBs of bandwidth each month. They are very low traffic sites and mainly are personal and a business site. The minecraft server is still a small fledging server. I run vanilla and plan on using mods sometime after 1.8 is out. I expect to have anywhere from 4 to 16 players on the server.

A 1G Linode will barf on anything but the smallest Minecraft world. Java *loves* RAM and will eat the shit out of it.

i run my own small vanilla minecraft server on a Linode, and Westeroscraft (http://westeroscraft.com/) is hosted on a Linode.

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me | voltaireMC

Website wise you'll be fine on a 1G. Minecraft is more tricky, especially with 16 players. Minecraft is very RAM intensive. You'll be able to limit it of course (with the -Xms option I believe? Been a while since I hosted a MC server), but you may encounter some lagging depending on the size of your world, how far away they are from eachother and what server mods you use. It'll need more time to get stuff from the disk that didn't fit on RAM.

It is however easy to upgrade, so if you do have issues with memory you can easily upgrade to a bigger package

I ran a Bukkit Minecraft server for months on a Linode 1G. At peak play there were about 10 players at any given time on the server, and it held up adequately. The server also ran a website or three, another Java application (personal music streamer) and ran nightly builds of the Minecraft Overviewer

You can get more done than you think with 1GB of RAM.

Hrm, apparently I was doing something wrong. Carry on, OP.

P.S. The Minecraft Guide on the Linode Library is a little out of date, but still useful. I would suggest not bothering to install Oracle JRE anymore, open java is just fine, but otherwise I stand by the procedure. I'll update the Java section someday...

Hmm, you guys feedback is getting more excited about getting a 1 GB linode for the above. I have no trouble keeping the player count down to say 12 players and limited the exploration of the world.

I suggest you start with one of the non-vanilla servers, especially if you're going to move to it anyway. They're slightly more optimized for RAM efficiency. It's still Java, mind you

I've been running a minecraft server on a 1G for several months now. Max of 5 players and running with ~600MB ram.

The vanilla mc server constantly gave me memory issues but with spigot there has been a considerable improvement in performance.

http://www.spigotmc.org/

I highly recommend spigot for running mc servers, especially in a low memory environment.

I was thinking about running spigot myself. I just assumed memory usage would be worse compared to vanilla not better. Thanks for the heads up guys! I'll probably order within a few weeks time once I get my next paycheck.

How easy is it to upgrade to the 2 GB linode from the 1 GB linode?

Do you guys have any recommendations for free control panels for webhosting? I've used cPanel almost exclusively the last few years and have limited experience with Webmin. I've done some of my own research and it seems Webmin and zPanel are only maintained free ones out there. Anyone have experience with either? Which would be a good choice?

Re: upgrading; super easy. A few weeks you say....

Re: control panel; You won't like this answer, but I suggest no control panel. If you're going to run a Minecraft server you might as well get comfortable with doing stuff through the CLI. When I ran Minecraft it was alongside a LeMP stack I installed manually. Nice thing there was that when I played with the Prism mod I already had a database to point it to that my web server could access, making game/website integration easier.

https://library.linode.com/lemp-guides/debian-7-wheezy

@Alexfornuto,

I'm willing to try new things, even manual setup. I was thinking of a control panel so if I let someone else access the webserver portion, I don't have to spend copious amount of time teaching them to use terminal, commands, and the general (lack) of a interface.

Thanks for all the links guys. Gonna read up on these so I'm somewhat prepared before diving into order the linode.

(Never mind. MySQL changed their website. Couldn't find the community download link until I did a rescan of the page. Silly me!)

So, wow, now that you'll be getting 2G instead of 1G, probably less of an issue.