Hi uber, you wrote that you currently host most of your servers on EC2. I don't know what instance types you're using, but virtualized servers in general can perform rather poorly when compared to servers with dedicated hardware ("bare-metal") ones, especially if the application is CPU-bound and latency-sensitive. You're probably aware of this, but just in case: recently some cloud providers have started offering competitively priced bare-metal cloud servers that are billed hourly. Softlayer is one of the biggest and also has datacenters in Amsterdam and Singapore. I could imagine that such servers could be a better match for your needs, especially in the alpha/beta phase, as they provide higher and more consistent performance.
Thanks for the suggestion. We use Softlayer as the primary "bare-metal" dedicated server provider for handling the baseline load of all games on UberNet, and we've found their server performance to be quite good. We use EC2 instances primarily to handle peak loads and to help during build release transitions, in which cases their quick startup time is really useful. For PA, we currently run Softlayer servers in Amsterdam and Dallas, and we'll be adding other regions as we go. We're running more games on EC2 instances at the moment than usual, because we're still experimenting with different hardware configurations to determine the best processor/memory/bandwidth mix for PA dedicated servers.
I love it when people suggest the strategy we already are using Also note that Softlayer just got bought by IBM.
Yeah, Softlayer is a popular choice for dedicated servers rented for longer terms. The fact that they also offer "bare-metal" cloud servers that are billed hourly is less known. I don't know how the spin-up times compare between EC2 and the Softlayer "cloud" instances, though.
