A friend (at BioWare) and I are cracking up, because we had considered the idea of doing EC2-based hosting of Minecraft (and Terraria) servers about 6 months ago. We ran an SMP server for a while, doing lots of performance testing and profiling.
However, we just couldn't see how we could get our margins to where they'd be worthwhile without raising the price of a hosted server to the point where it'd scare off potential customers. Low margins + a fair amount of customer support = something I didn't want to consider.
Kudos to someone putting the thought into that and solving the margin issue, spreading the per EC2-instance income over a much larger pool of people and raising the overall revenue-per-server.
In the meantime, I have other crazy ideas I'm working on while I try to line up a new day job. Good luck with this one!
I remember sitting with Chris at a SydJS meetup nearly a year ago and overhearing his plans for minefold. At the time they'd already written a bunch of code but were still very much in "stealth mode". At the time I was blown away by how much thought they'd put into the idea and have eagerly followed the development of it since.
However, we just couldn't see how we could get our margins to where they'd be worthwhile without raising the price of a hosted server to the point where it'd scare off potential customers. Low margins + a fair amount of customer support = something I didn't want to consider.
Kudos to someone putting the thought into that and solving the margin issue, spreading the per EC2-instance income over a much larger pool of people and raising the overall revenue-per-server.
In the meantime, I have other crazy ideas I'm working on while I try to line up a new day job. Good luck with this one!