Good Afternoon All,
I am coming up to the end of my annual Ventrillo server hosting term. I currently pay £52 ($80 / €70) per year for 35 slots. Looking around, this seems to be the lower end of the market but I am looking to reduce this further an so I am looking to this great community for some suggestions. If anyone has used Vent, TS & Mumble for a reasonable length of time, which one would you recommend and why?
I could reduce my costs to virtually zero because I have a Raspberry Pi sitting around doing nothing and from what I read I should be able to set up 30-40 slot Mumble server very easily. Has anyone else done this? General comments is that bandwidth will be the biggest bottle neck when doing this. Im guessing these comments are coming from the US where they have recently had to reclassify the term 'Broadband' to being 25 Mb / sec to stop companies advertising 2.5 Mb as fast broadband. Im sure my 40 / 10 Mb connection can handle this and my WoW connection without issue. My biggest concern is stability as it is up to me to make sure the server is up at all times rather than someone who's business is to make sure the servers are up and stable.
I have also seen there are a number of free services out there. E.g. RaidCall, Razer or Dolby. Does anyone have any experience with these? I tried RaidCall about a year ago and for the 5-10 minutes that I played around with it, it seemed very limited. Has any one used any of these before and considering being 100% free is not a requirement, would you recommend using them over the established programs?
Something else I have looked into is getting a basic virtual server that I could then install the server applications for Vent / TS or Mumble on. If I shop around I can get a VPS for about the same cost as it would be for me to get a 35 slot Mumble server but I would have my choice of the voice service we use and wont be limited by the number of slots on the server (within reason). The catch is it will be my responsibility to make sure the server is up. Does any one use this option for their guild?
Any advice you can give is greatly appreciated.
- Chev.