Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:03 PM

Hey everyone. For those of you who have been around for the past 2 and a half years you know that usually for some reason once every 3-6 months we end up moving data centers either because of money issues, network issues, or other misc problems. I really hate doing these moves, but this time we are moving again in hopes of a few things which I will outline below:

Problems with the current setup we have:

1. Random network drops late at night/early in the morning for NA/EU respectively. The network will sometimes completely drop for a few minutes which of course sucks for people who are playing ArenaPvP matches (our largest servers still by far).
2. Increased bow and rod delay - Currently the bows and rods and even the sword swings are all delayed because of our protection we have in place.
3. Terrible ping for the mid-west of the United States. People who live in Texas or in the mid-west have a ping of over 100 to our current NA datacenter in Virginia because they are being forced to route to Los Angeles first.
4. Too expensive - Our current bills are really high, and we are looking to try and cut them down a decent amount while solving the other issues as well.

Now that I have outlined what we currently have, I am going to move onto where we are moving our NA and EU datacenters (AU is being unaffected by this move except downtime). We are moving back to our last data center for anyone that was around playing a bit over 6 months ago from November 2014 - Early March 2015, OVH. OVH has been working on improving a number of things to try and appeal to the game market more and more including a special set of Anti-DDOS systems that are specific to Minecraft. This should allow for good protection and even smoother gameplay.

The pricing of OVH is a lot more affordable for us as well, as currently we are paying for our servers and then also paying a tremendous amount for protection. We have already done some testing the other day with our players and both the NA and EU players had a smoother gameplay experience even if their latency increased or decreased. EVERYONE, even the people who had higher ping, said the gameplay was smoother. This is going onto my next point with the obsession of ping when it comes to this game. This game is not like CS:GO. Ping does affect it slightly, but not to a ridiculous degree. Some of our best players have 100+ ping to the servers. I am also reminding players that the server and the client both run on a tick based system that is on 50ms intervals. That means if your packet gets to the server anywhere in that 50ms interval it is going to get processed at the same time. So if your ping is 20 or 30 it doesn't matter since it is the same 50ms interval. If your ping is 120 vs 60 that is where you will notice a bit of a difference.

Let me answer some common questions that I foresee below:

OMG! Nooo please don't move datacenters, I have such good ping

Read the paragraph above and stop your bitching. If you want to go cry to someone go cry to your mother. We are not babysitters here, we are a competitive gaming network.

Will my ping change a bunch? Will I feel it?

If you are in Southern California your ping will probably go up about 20. If you are in some bad areas of Quebec your ping might go up 20-30 also. Otherwise expect the ping to fluctuate by about 10-20 overall. You should not really feel much of a difference.

Where are the new servers located?

NA will be located in southern Quebec. EU will be located in Northern France. You can find the locations on www.ovh.com

Why can't we have west coast servers?

Fun fact for those of you who do not know. I am from the west coast. I would love to have servers on the west coast. The reason we cannot is either 1. Too expensive or 2. The protection for Anti-DDOS is not up to the Badlion Standard.

Well why don't you try this datacenter {Insert Link Here}

There are very few data centers that can handle the levels of DDOS attacks that we get hit by (scaling over 150Gbps). Most data centers would completely go offline facing these types of attacks. We have a very limited pool of available data centers that we can choose from. All of the enterprise level Anti-DDOS systems are at least 5 figures a month, which is way too much for us to be able to afford. They also do not have specific protection for Minecraft.

When is this going to happen?

We will have some down time randomly Saturday or Sunday. We do not have all of the servers yet, so we cannot predict when the downtime is yet. We will announce it on Twitter later in the week (Follow us if you haven't already. We post a lot of updates on there). We will be doing the downtime in a few phases:

1. Pull the entire network offline and move our databases to their new location.
2. While the databases are being moved we will move our bungees and our lobbies to the new locations.
3. After we have the DB and bungees moved we will turn back on the network. There will be some increased latency for a little while while some of our servers such as the ArenaPvP and UHC servers might be in a different data center from our bungees. This will be temporary, we will roll over the other servers once we know that the DB and Bungees are stabilized and the respective time zones are asleep so that we can minimize down time.
4. Website and teamspeak servers will be moved over lastly.

Later in the month there is going to be a second downtime. We will be moving some boxes within the data centers onto different hardware to be faster. We actually are going to be increasing the # of slots on our ArenaPvP servers and the UHC servers by a little bit with this faster hardware. The downtime for these changes should be very minimal, and will be once again when the respective time zones are asleep.

Is AU going to be offline?

Even though we are not moving AU, when we pull the entire network offline including the database, the AU servers will temporarily be offline as well.

How do i connect to the new servers?

Just use the same old na.badlion.net, eu.badlion.net, or au.badlion.net These addresses will still work but might take a few hours to migrate depending on where you live (48 hours max)

What should I do when Badlion is offline?

Watch a stream, go play on another network, get hyped that ArenaPvP Season 10 is coming out soon, read a book, watch a movie, have fun :)

I will answer any other questions below to the best I can. This is definitely not what I want to be doing this weekend coming back from my vacation, but we are trying to do what is best for the network. The fun fact is for many of you that do not know Archy and myself are in school and work full time respectively. We do this as a side project, this is not our full time job (although we try to treat it like it is).

tl;dr : Badlion is moving datacenters to improve network stability and make it more affordable. Expect some random downtime this weekend, follow and pay attention to www.twitter.com/BadlionNetwork

~MasterGberry

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:10 PM

Nice. :)

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:13 PM

Awesome! Thanks for all the work you guys do, we really appreciate it. Great job as always :D

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:14 PM

Seems good, will the numerical IP change?

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:15 PM

Yes

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:21 PM

Coolio

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:26 PM

When it changes hmu ;)

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:28 PM

Just ping na.badlion.net

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:28 PM

d.asfhiukerjxfv

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:30 PM

Is na gonna be hosted close to Montreal then?

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:34 PM

If I live in South America, will my ping increase or decrease?

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:38 PM

rip my 30 ms

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:40 PM

The last thing we want is Badlion to not be a network anymore. For all those people, whose ping might go up 10-20 ms, it really isn't the end of the world. It's much better for that to happen, than Badlion to completely shut down, be completely laggy or have random network shut downs because of DDOS etc. There are lag spikes on the server, you complain, but still play. Doesn't that show you that you love this server? XD.

If you keep bitching about this stuff, then it will demotivate Archy and Gberry and the developer team to keep improving Badlion. So before you start moaning, think again and be thankful rather than hateful. Otherwise, we could have no Badlion at all.

Just a quick thank you for Archy and Gberry for being motivated to still put in hours of effort into Badlion and making it IMO the BEST server in Minecraft. Without them, this wouldn't have happened

Oh yeah about the ping thing, thanks for moving the EU servers closer to England XD.

BETTER PING FOR ME xD

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 04:41 PM

glad i can get good ping in texas again :). 110ms want cutting it

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 05:11 PM

My Quebec ping is going to be amazing I am from Quebec :D

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 05:31 PM

Well i hope its the one in toronto but really wish it was the datacenter hosted in newark or in ny bc people in America will get better ping in the bright side ill get like 88 mc eu as an na s hype i guess. Im sad bc i had a chance to get like 6 ms to Newark

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 05:37 PM

Since I live in Massachusetts will I have better ping to Quebec or Virginia?

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 05:53 PM

WHAT ABOUT MY ELO!!!

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 05:54 PM

So my California ping will rise 20? Just a question :P

Posted on 10 September 2015 - 05:57 PM

g_g