Hosting

Here's an overview of our hosting situation. Because Minecraft doesn't run on potatoes.

Hardware
Most of our services are hosted on a dedicated/physical server rented from Hetzner. Specifically, this is our current server. The server was rented by in December 2014 and is paid by him, but the  are shared.

The following people have shell access to the server:


 * (root)
 * (root)
 * (root)
 * (root)

Since multiple people manage multiple things, we should really try to keep track of things.

Services on our main server
Most services are running under the user, which is also the group under which shared files should be kept to enable access from everybody else's accounts.


 * The Minecraft server
 * Mapcrafter
 * Wurstminebot
 * The Teamspeak 3 server
 * The API
 * This wiki
 * More stuff listed at http://meta.wurstmineberg.de/

Mail
On 2013-11-20, registered an uberspace for convenient mail setup: wmb@columba.uberspace.de. The MX-domain record of wurstmineberg.de is set up to that host, where .qmail-files define mail redirections for users who asked for one.

The rule for said redirections should be id@wurstmineberg.de, where id is the player's Wurstmineberg ID according to people.json.

Currently and the user   (including pretty much everyone who has access to the server, including wurstminebot) have access to the uberspace. Technically, this should make automated creation of redirections possible, as well as group mails to every player in case of emergency.

To add new redirects, you can execute  as   on our main server.

Other

 * The domain “wurstmineberg.de” was bought by to accommodate our server migration and is registered via inwx.
 * The Twitter account @wurstmineberg was registered by and is primarily used automatically by wurstminebot.
 * The subreddit /r/wurstmineberg was registered by in August 2013 in an attempt to organize discussion and announcements. It has been inactive since the Great Outage of 2013, and has been effectively replaced by this wiki and the tumblr.
 * The tumblr wurstmineberg (also reachable as news.wurstmineberg.de) has been registered by for announcements which previously would have appeared on the subreddit.

History
Here's a short overview over Wurstmineberg's previous hosting situations. Just because of nostalgia 'n stuff.

October 2012 to January 2013
The server was originally hosted on 's spare MacBook, which he was using as a quasi-NAS and homeserver. Back then only and  were playing, needing a way to continue their multiplayer map they started with less physical distance, so that actually worked. Kind of. Since he could only afford DSL with 16mbit/s down and 1mbit/s upstream, you can imagine how wonderful the Minecraft experience was in that time. But since there were only 2 to 3 people on the server, it was kind of okay.

January 2013 to August 2013
After trying a really really bad server hoster we don't even want to name, we migrated to the smallest server CubedHost had to offer and were pretty happy with that. Everything worked fine (except for one 24h downtime we never found out the reason for), but after a while we grew tired of its limitations, since MultiCraft and FTP-only access to the world files is not exactly the level of control we needed for the amount of tinkering we had in mind.

After moving to the next server, we switched the CubedHost copy of our world to Creative mode, and thus our Creative world was born. It was hosted here until 2013, when it was moved to peterpc.fenhl.net.

August 2013 to September 2013
We moved the server to a Strato vServer, which is exactly the kind of not ideal as you may suspect. We had a lot more control over the server and things like Wurstminebot and the website and the either really got going on that setup or profited greatly from it. However, performance was the biggest issue. 1-2GB RAM, a single CPU core, 50Gigs of space. As more people joined the server, we needed to upgrade sooner or later for reasons of advanced lag and frustration.

Since January 2014, when had to retire peterpc, this server has been running our Creative world.

September 2013 until December 2014
Once again, we moved everything to another server. This time hosted by Nessus, where other services known for their magnificient performance have been hosted on before. Specifically, Wurstmineberg was hosted on a server like this one. Due to the additional costs, we switched our financing when we migrated to this server, from a “ pays everything” model to a “pay what you want” model.

Now we had a complete physical machine to ourselves, and had the chance to set up as cleanly and neatly as we already should have done on the vServer. It also mostly fixed the perfomance issues (for a while), because who would have guessed that a physical server outperforming a vServer targeted at people who host websites would be a thing. It was mostly able to handle the Minecraft server with reasonable load while also generating once a day, so it was quite the step up from our previous vServer solution.

The following people had shell access to the server:


 * (root)
 * (root)
 * (root)
 * (root)
 * (root)

The server is still rented for January 2015 so that we have more time to migrate to the next one, which turned out to not be necessary because migration was pretty much completed by the end of 2014.

December 2014 until we need more powerful hardware
As the server load increased, especially during Ultra Softcore, we started looking for a more performant server again. Eventually, we chose this server hosted by Hetzner. It should be powerful enough to handle Minecraft with noticeably less lag, and might even run multiple worlds at the same time at one point (when our infrastructure supports it).

With the small downgrade in disk space, we decided to move some of our backups offsite. Currently some disk space is reserved for this at 's NAS.

Migration should be finished. If you notice that something is still missing, you have time to tell us until January 31.

We'll see how long this one lasts.