I know our current server is virtually lag-free most of the time, but I've had an opportunity to move the server closer to home and to also use my own hardare instead of renting a box in a datacenter.
Our new server hardare is mostly complete with the only missing parts being six more DIMMs and another Opteron CPU--both of which will arrive Monday.
New server:
2x AMD Opteron 2350 (2.0GHz, Quads, 65nm, Socket F)
8x 2GB ECC Registered DDR2-667
Tyan S2912 Dual Socket F E-ATX
2x Hitachi 160GB T7K250 SATA in RAID-1 (Mirror)
Dual Gigabit NICs
Windows Server 2008 Standard
Mostly unused DS3 (45Mbps, bidirectional over fiber)
Located in Kansas City, KS
So what does this do for us? Well, it should reduce pings for people on the west coast since it will be more geographically centered for the United States region. Pings for people on the east coast shouldn't increase by much. This also lets us run more community services without any impact on the Tribes server itself due to having eight K10 cores and 16GB of RAM to play with. Planned features include what we have now (PCRPG, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo) along with newer features such as Team Fortress 2 and possibly a Left 4 Dead server. Anyone want Garry's Mod or some other popular game hosted? We've got virtually unlimited serving power now.
So, this should be a good move for us. It's cheaper for me (I currently spend $1 of every $14 I make to keep this place running), faster, and more centralized. It opens new options. Suggestions, comments, etc welcome.
