Behind the scenes
What is the money you donate used for?
The main items that the donations are spent on:
1 – the yearly fee for the domain kaizen-worlds.net so you don’t have to use an ugly number
2 – hosting for our website, the one you are looking at now
3 – shared hosting plan for the actual server, we try to do this per 6 months to get a nice 15% discount
4 – a yearly fee for the dedicated IP port so you don’t need to add a number behind mc.kaizen-worlds.net
Any money left is either held in the PayPal account or used to buy a premium plugin which often has much better performance and support when compared to the free ones. Right now we run 11 premium plugins, like FactionTax, Leaderheads, MCMMO, Shop, ProQuests, Chat Control Pro, Headdatabase and many others.
The 3 options to run a Minecraft server.
1 – Run it on your home machine.
Ideally a dedicated machine you do not play on. With an SSD drive for fast map saves, plenty of RAM and a solid internet connection. Downside? You need to ensure the machine keeps running if a part breaks the server is down. If your internet connection has a problem your server is down. If you are using the internet connection to download something big or stream movies your minecraft server will lag and lastly it eats power from running 24/7/.
2 – hire dedicated hardware in a data centre.
Around the globe, there are big secure buildings that have rows and rows of powerful computers. These often feature power backup. Redundant parts so they can swap out broken parts and your data synced on another machine, in case yours goes down it will switch over. Downside? Expensive!
3 – rent a virtual machine in a data centre.
Like option 2 this data centre will have powerful machines but this time around you do not get the whole machine to yourself. Instead they run a virtual computer on that computer. Those machines will have server virtual machines running on them sharing the ram and storage. This is often not a problem as all servers are not active all the time. As such you can have something almost as good as option 2 for a fraction of the price. Downside? If the company you host with puts too many virtual machines on the real hardware you start lagging real bad.