Minecraft server
My son wanted his own minecraft server to play on and share with his friends. He has a chromebook that is in developer mode, with crouton installed so that he can run Ubuntu on his chromebook. Although he successfully setup the server on his Ubuntu chromebook, it was difficult to share with friends because he'd constantly be changing LAN environments (which means changing port-forwarding rules on a firewall, and advertising the public IP address).
So, I offered to investigate a few options.
- host it on a shared hosting account at Webfaction. That could work, and remains to be seen, but if only paying for a $10/month account, you're only going to get 512MB of RAM
- host it using the Bitnami Craftbukkit server package/distro plus an Amazon AWS account. With this option, the free "micro" instance of AWS is not sufficient to run minecraft. I didn't want to explore the cost of running a minecraft server on AWS. I also tried running the Craftbukkit server in VirtualBox, but it gave an OVA error.
- host it on my beefy 12GB RAM Windows 8 machine by setting up Virtual Box, and then installing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as a guest operating system which is dedicated to Minecraft. This way will require a bit of tweaking compared to the Bitnami pre-packaged setup, but actually the requirements are pretty minimal. You just have to get Java working.
With the third option, I don't have to pay for anything but electricity. The IP address of the server will remain fixed, and I can even add in DynDNS if I really want to. I would never open up my firewall to a Windows host on my network. Thanks to VirtualBox and Ubuntu, I don't have to. I simply port-forward to the Ubuntu guest OS. That host is purpose-built and doesn't have any special abilities.
