I made over 100k this year from my minecraft server(2nd year

>>1016770
Start another one?

I'll pay you an extra few grand if you can instruct me how to setup, and operate a minecraft server biz too

>>1016784

Why would he accept a few thousand to instruct you how to be a direct competitor with him?

>>1016778
Mine is a "network" so I am already adding new ones.
I have all my money in my bank and paypal how do I start investing

>>1016789
Open a Roth IRA and invest in VTI or VOO

>>1016784
>>1016786
The hardest part is getting players. There is already a ton of competition. I would give info for free honestly

>>1016792
I was thinking about buying rental property is that a good idea

>>1016799
Not unless you have experience and it's not in a shit area

Simply do the same thing with a small tweak in another place.

>>1016770
Keep 10k in a normal bond fund, low risk. Very liquid so if you need cash, use it.
Buy a few bitcoins just for the sake of it, maybe 1k.
Mostly hold the rest into a S&P 500 ETF. Don't worry about dips in the market, it would be an opportunity to buy even more.
Dollars cost average and long-term investing is your way to go. This bull market soon will end the his first leg and will start another leg up for the decade to come.

>>1016856
Also, you should prepare to start buying some commodities ETF when :
>gold will hit 950$.
>Oil hit the 20's, 10$.

Fuck bottom pickers, dollars has more room to the upside, especially with EUR/USD not yet around 0,90$ but considering the risk/reward ratio, you might give it a try.

Would Canadian money be a good investment? Isn't it bound to go back up eventually?

>>1016770
Do you happen to run a youtube channel? I would assume thats how you advertised your server?

>>1016892
Nope. There are minecraft listing websites where players can vote for you and this improves your rank. I basically started out by spending hours manually boosting my listing with fake votes to get it to the top on one website.
There were times where I'd spend 12 hours boosting it only to have them delete us. Then I would just remake the listing and start over.
Now we have the player base to be in the top 1-10 of just about every voting website. Exempt for minecraftservers.org because of all the bots.

>>1016770
>and I sell in game items and ranks.
Does this really work? I mean what can they actually buy in Minecraft with microtransactions?

>>1016921
Yea there's plugins to add more content and you sell ranks with special commands and cosmetic features like colored name tags or a command to repair their armor for free etc.
Then you can also sell items that are more powerful so it's basically pay to win. On my server if you die you lose the items too. I have seen people spend hundreds of dollars then die in pop and lost it 15 minutes later.

The really funny trend on minecraft servers though is no one calls it micro transactions. It's almost universally called "donating" and plays look at it as a way to support their favorite server etc

Every few months I usually get people who will spend thousands.The most I've ever seen from 1 person was a little over $5000 during a 2 month period

>>1016933
Pvp not pop
Players not plays
Phone typoes

wasn't selling items banned?

>>1016973
>>https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/

You are allowed to charge players to access your server
So long as the fee is the same for all players, you are allowed to charge for access to your server. You are not allowed to split your playerbase into paying, and non-paying users, nor can you restrict gameplay elements to different tiers of player.

Basically, if you’re charging for access to your server, you are selling a “ticket” and there can only be one type of ticket, regardless of how much people are willing to spend.

You are allowed to accept donations
You are allowed to accept donations from players. You can thank them publicly or in-game, but can’t give preferential treatment for donating. You are not allowed to restrict gameplay features in an attempt to make money.

You are allowed to provide in-game advertising or sponsorship opportunities
You are allowed to put adverts in your Minecraft worlds to help with costs. Used within reason, adverts and sponsorship can be appropriate ways to fund a server.

You are allowed to sell in-game items so long as they don’t affect gameplay
We don’t mind you selling items in game, but they must be purely cosmetic. Pets, hats, and particle effects are OK, but swords, invincibility potions, and man-eating pigs are not. We want all players to be presented with the same gameplay features, whether they decide to pay or not.

There is one exception to this rule - capes! We have a lot of fun making cool capes for extra-special members of our community and Minecon attendees. We’d like to keep them as exclusive as possible. So, yeah, no capes please, even if you're giving them away for free.

>>1016976
That was changed right before Microsoft bought mojang and I have never seen it enforced.
All the servers basically just ignore it and it has actually always been against their eula and with cosmetics it's now less strict

>>1016984
link to the new rules? just because everyone ignores it doesn't make it legal - ms has some very good lawyers at their disposal

>>1016988
Those are the current rules I meant those are less strict then the ones before it.
Microsoft would alienate a large part of their community if they started enforcing that and it's already been like a year and a half since it was changed.

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>>1016789
List me as your trader for forex I make my clients 10% compound interest a month guaranteed

>>1017028
>guaranteed

>>1017028
I said I have no friends not extra chromosomes

>>1017042
where's a decent place to learn how to do this?

>>1017042
also, how much time do you spend running it - i'd imagine it'd take lots of hours of watching over it?

>>1017045
YouTube videos and the spigots and bukkit forums a little bit. You just have to keep in mind that a lot of posters are 14 year olds and people who have never had a sucessful server.

The most common false advice I see given out is that you have to be original with your server design.
I literally copy everything I do from other severs and have nothing original. This is how I choose what to work on:
Look around at popular servers.
Find something that's proven to be successful.
Copy + Improve if possible
Guaranteed success and no wasting time on things that might not be popular.

You would also need a good understanding of minecraft gameplay

>>1017050
At this point I have everything automated and I have a lot of volunteers to do work.
Players will do almost anything for staff ranks.

It's very time consuming at first though but once it's all set up it will run itself if you did it right

> 1500 per month for a few servers

You better have over 1000 servers for a cost like that.

>>1017100
I have 16 dedicated servers rented out from ovh.com and servers are not the only expense

>>1017110

That's still a ridiculous cost. Do the math for buying equivalent hw and a business line, that investment would pay for itself in months and drop your monthly cost to just electricity + internet.

>>1017110
would you recommend any minecraft server hosting sites?
and is there that much of a difference between spigot and craftbukkit?
i haven't played minecraft seriously in years.

>>1017117
No ddos protection on that and even if we didn't need it(we do) I doubt I can get 1000+Mbps at my house

>>1017110

Anon hello,

I sell servers, all kinds of stuff.

High end, low end, wall rack server arrays full of blade servers,.

You can buy the servers that company is renting to you, they probably have you on 1% of one blade in an array.

You can also buy cheap servers, few year old refurbished power edge, proliant, etc.

Think it over and let me know,

>>1017117

Couldn't agree more

Anon is getting fucked, plain and simple.

>>1017122
Spigot is an optimized bukkit and is used by almost everyone. Like a little over a year ago one of the main bukkit devs got pissed because mojang bought bukkit and he didn't know or something and felt used so he dmced them to remove his code. I'm not that familiar with middlemen hosts I would use dedicated servers for any serious attempt.

>>1016770
Make sure your playerbase stays satisfied with good updates and prevent it from dying due to it.

Never played minecraft, but if a game or mmo is shit, servers die fast.

Maybe you could look up to do this in another game? WoW is pretty shitty at the moment and a lot of players just play on private servers (partly due to the cost partly due to them being easier to do stuff in). Ever thought about running a bot netwerk and real money trade the gains away?

Path of Exile is a very good game for this, most players are adults and thus don't mind spending 50$ to not have to grind for good gear.

>>1016933
Lol if I were to make a p2w game it would be like being a casino and watching someone blow thousands away. Couldn't really do it for ethic reasons.

Who even plays minecraft its graphics are total ass. Doesn't it have a main dev and server, who would even play on a p2w server if you can just make your own where you can do whatever you want? I don't mind games where your donations are actually donations and the stuff you buy is all cosmetics or extremely neglectable advantages (like more bag space in certain games).
>>1017117
Cost is pretty normal for what he does though.

>>1017140
autists play it because it's like legos and autists love legos.

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>>1017117

Checking out ovh.com, their cheapest minecraft server is a quad devil's canyon with 32gb RAM. Minecraft pretty much uses memory but not much else.

That means you can get really sweet deals on a few years old top-of-the-line 64 core AMD servers, max out the memory, and run everything on a single box.

I checked the prices, for a 64 core Interlagos box with 512GB RAM you'd pay around 6k prebuilt. Half that if you build yourself. And it uses less than 500W peak.

>>1017127

If you live in a bad spot, then you buy hw and rent a colo spot with a link like that. Likewise, ddos protection from cloudflare or other such providers ain't that much.

>>1017131
>>1017130
I'm not. We need ddos protected servers and our servers have i7-4790k(best cpu for minecraft hosting) 32gb ram 2 raid 0 ssds
Blade servers are not powerful enough to host our servers

>>1017144
You are mistaken. Minecraft severs are bottlenecked mostly by the cpu.

And ddos protection providers like that are not made for minecraft and would add too much extra latency

>>1017146

Anon, I have servers, that put that ^^^>>1017144

turd to shame. You want an expensive server? Fine. I have 15 core xeon cpus, and machines that seat 4 of them. Machines that seat 512gb of ram, and the rack mounts you slide 20 of them on.

But you need something like that. The stuff you are paying to rent is consumer shit, and moreover, it's a 2 year old consumer shit.

I have 2 year old enterprise class servers that are 10 times as fast as what you've been paying for that sever monthly.

>>1017146
>>1017147

Well then, then you buy 16 Devils Canyon boxes and place them at that colo. Still just a few months payback time, then it's free money.

I do wonder if they really need it though; have you benchmarked?

> And ddos protection providers like that are not made for minecraft and would add too much extra latency
Hire a network professional to design you a solution specific for Minecraft then. This all is not magic, they can charge what they do because people don't bother researching.

Minecraft servers do not scale well and the main server thread is limited to one core so you need a couple with good single core performance.

Even with the best hardware you will only get 300 on your average server(more or less depending on plugins) before you get lag. We use proxies to link multiple separate minecraft servers together to get thousands on the "network".
Ram is almost never a real issue and you can actually cause lag by allocating too much ram because of the java garbage collecting

>>1017157

don't need*

anon you would be surprised how affordable and effective this can be

One of these servers, and you have that processing power x 10, in case you ever need it, in case you want to rent it out

>>1017158
The costs and hardware for that would be astronomical

Your network capacity has to be greater then the attack otherwise your lines would just be saturated

>>1017157
Minecraft servers do not use multiple cores. We need single core performance

>>1017160
I have been running my server for over 3 years and have already looked into collocation and it would take years to make my money back and I would still need the ddos protection which wouldn't be worth the extra latency

Pretend you are Xipe Totec and demand that you be allowed to flay them and wear their skins as a coat for 20 days until they rot off

>>1017165

That's not how it works. The edge router will block that, not your small line, and nobody with a hundred Gbps will be interested in mucking with some game server.

>>1016770
has use declined over the years as the auties grow up?

>>1017183
It would for buisness and collocation. The edge firewall would also have to identify it as a ddos attack and block it while allowing legitimate traffic through. Attacks up to 30-50Gbps are pretty common along with smaller layer 4 attacks. On top of this our proxies need 1gbps(we have 4) lines and usually transfers 50+tb of data monthly and most collocations don't offer 1gbps unmetered.

>>1017208

best of luck

>>1017193
Not really that I have noticed but there have been some interesting changes in the country demographics over the years.

>>1017213
is your server a pay to play server or "donations" only?

>>1017213

what were the changes

>>1017222
Free to join
It's just pay to win. It's very hard for people who didn't buy at least a rank to compete

>>1017224
United States players down and Asia + Middle East + Euopre going up.
There are also demographic spikes throughout the year that correlate to school holidays in that specific country.

>>1017238
if there are so many kids, how can they give you money as they're too young to get a paypal?

/biz/ should definitely have more threads like this. Honest, actually good e-biz, not cryptoshit or "hurr durr how do I make 30% a year like warren buffet?!?"
10/10 OP

>>1017259
We accept PayPal and paymentwall
Paymentwall accepts prepaid, bank transfers, and sms payments so it's very popular oversea
With PayPal usually it's the parents buying these items/ranks for their kids or they use a prepaid PayPal/credit card

Every once in a while a kid will use their parents credit card without their permission. The record for that is $2000 from one kid in less then a week

>>1017259
PayPal has guest checkout too and most teens have unverified paypals for making puchases anyways

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>>1017264
How do I earn 30% like warren buffet though

>>1017331
short doge long btc obviously

>>1017271
On what could he possibly spend $2k in less than a week??? I'm amazed

>>1017264
>not cryptoshit
Sore nocoiner spotted.

>>1017271
You should set up paysafecard definitely.

Prepaid cards are very popular under kids since they can't use a banking pass. Some people are too stupid / won't bother setting up a paypal from private server. Not sure how hard it is to setup paysafecard.

>>1017344
Wondering about this as well lol. I knew some pay to win games and you could blow like 500$ max on them.

never played minecraft ever. what exactly is the point?

>>1017363
I don't know either.

I didn't even know this shitty game was popular let alone something you can make money off.

I thought the money was at popular games that have an older audience. Just look at a game like PathofExile while being a very good game people can donate (not pay to win, just micro transactions for looks). Because its popular and a legit good game people are more willing to give money for it, leading to some rich people playing who can miss 1000$ easily and spend it on the game.

League of Legends has the same thing going for it lots of people spending money for custom skin effect and additional rune pages.

>>1017344
Ranks and items for himself and his "friends".

The armor+weapon set he was using was around $100 and every time he died he would buy another.
Then he had a group of leeches pretending to be his friend for items/ranks and he was buying them $100 armor/weapon sets with 10-60$ ranks.

Turns out his grandpa gave him his card to buy a $20 rank only.
I will usually refund for cases like this but for this one I was using stripe at the time and he filed a chargeback and stripe charges $15 per transaction. So I was forced to fight it to recover the fees and ended up winning.
Ended up losing my stripe account anyways between this and a bunch of Romanian credit card fraud making my chargeback % too high

>>1017361
Yea we accept it through paymentwall. It's one of the most popular European prepaid cards.

>>1017371

according to the mincraft website over 20 million people bought the game. Minecraft is unique in that you can do anything, build shit, roleplay, whatever. the only limit is your imagination

I don't know how the target audience became autistic kids though, I haven't played the game in like 4 years

>>1017376
i've heard of stripe just cancelling accounts like this. from what i can see it seems a fairly common thing for them to do as there are plenty more fish in the sea for them.

>>1017376
Sometimes I want to run a game server just to look at some of the more retarded conversations people have in the game. You're bound to catch personal drama somewhere in private conversations.

Just for my own pleasure.

>>1016799
Buy stocks in companies that do that instead of doing it yourself is probably better. Probably more profitable and guaranteed simpler and safer.

>>1016889
Buy canadian stocks instead. Still get profit from currency effect but also dividends and increased market value(over time).

>>1017390
Yea there are for sure. The kids from the Arab countries are the worst.
I think it's because everything is so censored there.
There are maps that normally show land features but there's a way to turn them into lower quality images.
So one day I was making random images and dropping them to players for fun and this was around the whole Miley twerking incident in 2014 so I dropped Miley twerking to one of the Arab kids.
He brought it back to his faction base and framed it and showed it to his other Arab faction mates,
They went CRAZY and started spamming me begging for more.
So I took a bunch of shemale porn pics cut out the bottom half and gave it to them.
They thanked me and kept them for months till we had a server reset.

>>1017401
Ebin :DDD

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>>1017401
Map pic I got on google to show what I'm talking about. Looked similar to that

>>1017413
you could sell that though, right?

>>1017423
I could but it wouldn't sell very well. The best sellers are things that either give advantage over other players or save the buyer a significant amount of time

>>1016770
how much actual work does it take? how many hours per day do you spend doing stuff on the server?

>>1017429
As it is now I have everything fully automated so the only real requirement for me is to spend like an hour per week taking care of customer issues that the staff can't handle.
I still spend a lot of time working on new servers to increase my revenue but that's not required.
It can be very time consuming to make from scratch but after its up its very easy to maintain if you set it up with automation in mind.

>>1017429
When you first start server building can seem overwhelming because there is a lot to learn but eventually it just becomes tedious and time consuming.
A new server would also have to spend a lot of time building a playerbase and you would need a website

I don't think it would be as profitable but I have also seen Gary's mod servers selling ranks and perks. A system like this could be applied to almost any sandbox type game I think

>>1017437
>>1017448
what sort of education did you require for it, just general sysadmin and server admin stuff or anything more specific?

>>1017451
I didn't know anything when I started I learned it all on the way as I ran into different problems. I would recommend using multicraft to manage your minecraft servers on a dedicated server with Ubuntu.
There are guides on how to install multi raft and you will need winscp and putty to access the server

If that's too hard you could go with shared hosting too and with that you would go right into the plugin config for your server.
I would recommend getting dedicated server though.
You also should learn how to make scheduled backups on Ubuntu

>>1017451
I am 2 years into my computer science degree and I have a ccna but I didn't do that till like a year after it opened

Excellent thread, OP.

Great thread, made me actually curious.

Is there some sort of exchange between server owners, or do you see them as competitors mainly?

Do you pretend to run the server 'just for the fun of it' when interacting with your players? Or do they just not care at all?

>>1016770

Use the money to develop your social skills and better yourself so you can start a family and function in society

>>1017566
Excellent advice, my personal goal.

>>1016856
>Buy a few bitcoins
credibility lost

VPS Company, even more passive income.

>>1016933
Thanks for the reply! Keep up the good work!

>>1017566
Yep, seems to be best advice. At making 100k a year and no friends seems like he needs to spend more time getting friends and a gf

>>1016872
>gold

silver is still sitting below the historical average adjusted for inflation

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>>1017157
whatever you want, i gots it

>>1016770

What makes your server more attractive relative to all the rest? Do you have to be personally involved in the gameplay to keep the community?

There are more games with potential do to this?

>>1018913
Seconding this. I've got 3 pretty decently powerful PC's running right now I use for various things, and I can probably dedicate one of them for a server starting out. But I can't devote all my time to it. I play Minecraft occasionally on the weekend, but that's about it.

I can probably devote 1-2 hours every other day of just sitting in and talking to people. but anymore than that I can't do. So I'd like to know how much personal involvement I'd have to devote in game.

>>1018550

a sale is a sale you try everytime or you're not a salesman

>>1018475

he has acess to hundreds of thousands in free cash he needs to run with it

he needs a new business while this minecraft cash cow is still alive

he needs to create an exit strategy for himself

>>1017147
This. You would think large Java apps consuming a ton of RAM are bottlenecked on the RAM, but it's actually the GC pauses which kill you.

Invest on bitcoins

>>1017452
But what moved you to do this? Probably most of us here would be capable to learn how to run a minecraft server, but (at least before hearing about your story) would never be moved to study and learn such a specific skill.

And even if you say you're an "autist", you certainly don't sound like that (that thing about sending shemale pics to fool the kids is certainly more "asshole" than "autist". So I wouldn't believe it was just mental obsession that led you to begin your project.

>>1016794
i'd do this to kickstart a server:
>pay like 20 autists to play at your server, half of them pretending to be girls 24/7 and build things, then make some impressive youtube video of the server with real viewing value and spam it on reddit etc so people hear of it and when they join, there is actually others online
>buy ddos attacks on competiting servers and commit mischief to get their admins reputation ruined so people join yours

>>1021120
Nice plan but it does require a large investment at the start

live life as intended

[spoiler]do what you want with it,you earned it[/spoiler]

>>1016770

>Minecraft economy

Unsustainable bullshit unrelated to the real economy general thread?

How did you vote yourself up? Most of those top sites are encrypted or use recaptcha. Did you just find some less popular ones and start there?

>>1017110
>ovh.com
don't know if shill or legit
however, what are other expenses you have?

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>>1016856

>bitcoins

>>1016770
How much time a day do you spend on this game? I hate the game, but would be willing to spend time in it if it turns into mostly passive income.

>>1022734
Something like this could never be described as "passive" income.