I remember back when it was a Garry’s Mod server that became a favorite to many people, around the same time PGM was around. And then everyone requested more and more game servers, and I complied. And then the community got bigger, and problems arose, and more bullshit happened and kept happening. So I tried to bandage the community by reinventing it into a bigger community that encompassed all sorts of games… well you know the story.

The saddest part is that The Arcadium got lost in all the commotion… until now. Yes The Arcadium is coming back. When? Soon.

After nearly two years with my current server host I decided to switch to a new host. This time its going to be a provider on the east coast. WHRY?!? …you ask. Well, mainly because the provider is a really good one (from what I’ve been reading) and they only have data centers over there. Most of the people that play seem to be east coast as well. I did a few traceroutes and ping tests and I get a pretty good ping to there location anyways, so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal for me and the other west coasters.

So once the new server is ready I’ll get The Arcadium server up again and let everyone know!

We keep the website on a shared hosting account and the game servers on our dedicated server. Believe it or not, websites are resource hogs… especially high traffic ones. Every time someone loads up a page from your site, all the content including images needs to be accessed and sent over to the user. And that’s not even mentioning MySQL. If you have something running a database (i.e. a blog or forums) not only does the previously mentioned stuff happen, but then the MySQL server has to perform a query (or maybe even 10 queries, depending on what you’re doing).

So start taking that into account every time you hit refresh on a forum page, or quickly browse through pages of a post. There’s a lot of shit going on behind the scenes. And we wouldn’t want all that affecting the experience of those in our servers.

Now that you understand why we keep them separated, there’s one other issue. How do you communicate between the two? This is a major part of our task because people like seeing the integration of game server and website/forum. For the stability of the games, we keep the game data local to the server. WHRY? Simple answer is simple: you never want the game server dependent on ANYTHING. If the data is stored on the website and the website takes a shit… what happens? Yup… the game server takes a shit too, and you have a possibility of lost data.

Overcoming this obstacle isn’t all that hard, but the solution can’t bring down resources on the game server as I spoke about earlier. I’ll explain how we do this later.