Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Hi everyone,

As recently mentioned, we have been discussing new plans a lot behind the scenes. Today I'm able to announce that KnightsandMerchants.net and KaMRemake.com will be undergoing technical changes in short time.

Since the beginning of KaM.net, we have always run on Shared Hosting. This works great if you're running just a website, but we've decided to collaborate more and better with KaM Remake and it's team (being Krom and Lewin of course). Apart from that, the shared hosting KaM.net was running on, no longer offered us enough for what we needed. That's why we've decided to buy a Virtual Private Server (VPS).

A VPS gives us the opportunity to own, configure and use an entire server the way we want it to. To give you an example, these are our plans with the VPS:

• Host both websites (KnightsandMerchants.net and KaMRemake.com)
• Host Ben's Teamspeak server with a maximum of 512 slots.
• Host the KaM Remake master server
• Host the KaM Remake Crash Upload Handler
• Host KaMRepos, the requested repository where you can upload, download, rate and comment on Knights and Merchants maps and replays
• Optional: host an official KaM Remake game server

Needless to say, with our current hosting, we would only be able to do the first item in the list.

These technical changes are also challenging. I have a lot of experience with a lot of what is about to happen, but there will also be new things to me. It may happen (practically can't be avoided) that we will experience some downtime. However, I will always try to announce that in advance. If there's unannounced downtime, I probably did something wrong

But, to keep you guys informed when KaM.net, KaMRemake.com or both are down, KaM.net now has a Twitter account! You can find it here: https://twitter.com/KaMdotNet
If you follow us, you will always know what's going on when we're down or how we are doing with the technical changes.

I hope I informed you all well enough. Any questions can be posted below (as always).

Wish us luck!

Tom

Sounds awesome! Good luck with it

The only concern I got with this is that on a new version release (for example), the usual DDoS effect will take down everything KaM-related. Or will the server be powerful enough to prevent that? Ah well, I guess we can always go to Exodus TS for a while when things go wrong.

DDoS attacks are nearly impossible to deal with, so yes, everything KaM-related will go down. However, we do have the Twitter account to update everyone if it will ever happen. Which is seriously doubt, because why would anyone? DDoS attacks only occur if you piss off hackers, we don't.

Edit: Oh wait. I think you meant the massive downloading that will happen with a new KaM Remake release? We should very well be able to deal with that. It may slow us down a bit, but we've calculated that in when we compared hosts.

Yeah, sry, I usually refer to massive downloading of the new version as DDoS effect because the way it works is basically the same.

Wonderful ! It seems that once it's done, everything will be much smoother and I'm really looking forward to the KaMRepos !

I hope you didn't already order and pay for the VPS. I found this, which might be more interesting than the VPS.

That's not really a serious option. Even though it's dedicated, the specs aren't as good (weak for dedicated) as our VPS, it's not scalable, has no RAID setup, and bad support. Let alone all the negative reviews.

No, the box we're about to setup offers us way more than that and with great support. And if there's a real problem, I can be on scene within two hours.