Server providers for South-Africa

Don't want to jinx anything. But it seems like Psychz servers are gone?

Played a while last night and this morning. Other than getting thrown onto a Frankfurt server every now and then, it was super smooth especially early this morning. Got put onto a SA server almost every insance.

Once people started waking up im ending up on Frankfurt again every 2nd instance.

Seems you are right. I keep getting placed on Frankfurt instances too, had no issues this morning.

Can confirm the same :)

And as odd as it sounds, it's the more ideal solution to have overflow go to a European gateway than to a locally hosted one. Stable latency is better than the Psychz packet loss.

Hopefully they are looking at alternatives for baremetal hosting in South Africa.

Also, fantastic league :D Smooth AF launch, great fun.

Is there a way for me to only play on SA servers. I'd honestly rather sit in a queue and wait 5-10 minutes before running a map than playing with the lag. I know lot's of people aren't bothered that much by the lag but to me POE is unplayable with the high ping.

Hi @Fitzy_GGG is there any feedback about increasing capacity for the SA server project?

How is the project looking overall in terms of getting a permenant server?

Kind Regards

"

ElderWyrm wrote:

Is there a way for me to only play on SA servers. I'd honestly rather sit in a queue and wait 5-10 minutes before running a map than playing with the lag. I know lot's of people aren't bothered that much by the lag but to me POE is unplayable with the high ping.

Well, this was the status quo for last league when the population was high. As a summary, this is how it was:

Azure (cloud) hosted: Smooth sailing, little to no issues. This is what you currently connect to in this league when you manage to get on the South African gateway.

GGG rented a baremetal (cheaper cost) server with a company called Psychz, which proved to be an issue. While locally hosted, extreme packet loss and server instability plagued the South African player base whenever the capacity exceeded what they had provisioned on Azure (the more expensive option for hosting). You could go from beautiful ping to unplayable just by changing zone. Even within maps, you could enter a vaal side area and end up having this change on you, or if you went in and out to make a trade, you were gambling with this as well. Trying to do labyrinth was just as dicey, often bouncing between good and bad every zone. Not a great experience.

They were previously routing overflow traffic from Psychz to London gateway, but this has been changed this league. It seems that Psychz is no longer in use (hopefully it stays that way). Trust me when I say - Azure + overflow to EU (which has a solid, albeit higher latency) is much more preferable than hitting a Psychz server which could give you 1000+ ms ping spikes, often.

It's still experimental. Take it as is, they at least appear to be doing some work behind the scenes again rather than just "ignoring" the thread. Having a sometimes SA server instance is also preferable to not having it at all.

Just wish we had a bit more communication / transparency from their end, but I am just glad that Psychz is gone during this launch period. Hopefully for good.

Good to hear from you Fitzy, and even better to hear that Psychz has been ditched! Rejoice! :) Glad to see that this is getting some attention again.

While I do work in the cloud space here in South Africa, I unfortunately don't know the baremetal hosts here by reputation or quality. Understandably, shopping from NZ is gonna be even more troublesome I'd imagine.

I'd like to mention that Cape Town based hosting may yield better results, as it is the landing site of multiple undersea cables and a thriving datacenter population.

Good luck on the search! And know that you have an army of players willing to give feedback on whatever is being tested :)

Edit: I'd like to bring your attention to the MyBroadband forum, which is the most well known forum here in South Africa for all things Internet. This very recent thread has recommendations on it:

(Links obfuscated as I am not sure what the policy on linking things is!)

https://mybroadband.co[.]za/forum/threads/looking-for-dedicated-bare-metal.1172844/#post-28792742

A user recommended https://virtualservers.co[.]za/dedicated-servers/ for modernized hardware and a bit of further investigation shows they have good reputation. Additionally, they are setup within Teraco, which is a trusted name when it comes to datacenters in South Africa.

Hope that helps!

"

Fitzy_GGG wrote:

Those specific bare metal servers are gone for good.

I'm still looking for permanent options as Azure is 3-4x more expensive than bare metal.

I've upped the Azure capacity temporarily so hopefully less people get thrown to EU for the weeks around launch.

Fitzy you should really make a post on Mybroadband, you'll get some big ISPs here in SA willing to do your hosting for you for free, lots of companies here passionate about growing online gaming in South Africa.

AFAIK CoolIdeas, and even Afrihost would definitely be down to help out.

EDIT: I've contacted Gian Visser, CEO of Afrihost, to have them reach out to you on the forums here, maybe something can be worked out, they're a world class ISP. Anyone here can vouch for Afrihost, they are quite massive.

Really excited to see activity regarding the experimental server and it puts a heap of hope out there for streamlined gaming in South Africa.

I am aware that it is very barebones at the moment, as of late however, there seem to be strange spikes on off-peak times for the experimental server, not sure if this is due to instances being filled or just bad routing - which is very apparent with most ISPs here it seems - also seems to be a few ISPs that have strange latencies to the server, a few friends locally report 250+ ping to the experimental but 140 +/- to frankfurt or london.

It is rather strange as when I moved I was playing using mobile-tethering(which is at most times extremely unstable) and was reaching 35-40 ms whilst my friend with 200 mbps fibre internet would sit with 260 ping that wouldn't drop. I am very inexperienced with networking and all the jargon related to it but hoping we can somehow find a workaround to this.

I am extremely excited for the possibility of a permanent server and have been encouraging some old friends to give it a go with the new servers.

Warmest Regards