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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Minefold is something you wouldn't assume would be hugely lucrative unless you are the parent of a 10-13 year old kid, in which case you are kicking yourself for not putting sane pricing on top of on-demand Minecraft servers that don't require you to tech support a colo machine.

I'd be a customer right now, except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him. But for the problem that colo solves for him, it's hellaciously expensive.

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If you wait another 3 months I'm sure he'll be running his own hosting business. The majority[1] of Minecraft hosting businesses are ran by teenagers, it's quite interesting how low the barriers to entry are. $50 for 1 month rental on a mediocre dedicated server, $10 for a domain and $20 for a billing system license and then a couple of hours to configure a website template to your liking and you're ready to go! All you need is a few customers and you're already making money. Problem is without volume the business(es) will never make much profit, but for a lot of teenagers $200/m profit and the joy from running a business is worth it. It's the shared hosting of 201x[2]

It can be pretty treacherous for consumers though (part of why Minefold is great, by investing in building a platform they've demonstrated they have commitment to the business) because inevitably most teenagers don't understand the commitment they're making to their customers and things frequently fall apart. I can't count the amount of problems hosts falling apart has caused me, I had to make a concious effort to exclude it from my life about 6 months ago after a kid threatened to drive to my apartment and beat me up.

[1] Most are relatively small but there are quite a few teenage run Minecraft hosts supporting thousands of customers. The biggest Minecraft hosts are "proper businesses" though, with companies like Multiplay hosting ~15k Minecraft servers.

[2] I assume everyone here had their fun times running a web host at some point in their internet career.

This was just the state of the web a little less than ten years ago as well. One of my first businesses as a 12-year-old was running a couple of shared servers and teaching others how to do it as well. The little-big-leagues was actually getting dedicated servers of your own, rented or colo. It taught me a hell of a lot about how to manage a brand at a small scale, as well as how to treat customers (some of whom were clients as well, but with slightly different needs). You're definitely right about some kids not knowing how to deal with the effort and responsibility of running a service business (no matter how small), but there were definitely a few who took it the other way– I would bend over backwards to keep people happy in fear of damaging my credibility.

Anyway, I think it's great that Minecraft can become an outlet for those kids today. Some customers will get a lesson on dealing with people they don't know or trust, and a few young providers will get more than a few valuable lessons on providing a service and keeping people happy.

If you are the parent of 4-7 year old kids, it's just another server to support.

And the client's demands are ridiculous.

except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him

That should be obvious, since intrinsic motivation is always better than extrinsic motivation.

But if it were obvious, I, too, would have realized that I should have given my son a unix box to run his own minecraft server. I wonder if that would work for Christmas.

Swear to god, what the boy wants for Xmas this year: MORE RAM FOR HIS COLO.

I'm not sure whether I'm thrilled or terrified.

Just wait until he finds out about bitcoins.

No way. Boy! In our house, we obey the rules of macroeconomics!

I'm not sure if the potential lag involved in European hosting would make this pointless, but there are some mega cheap-yet-reliable-enough deals out there. 32gb plus a couple of terabytes storage is available from Hetzner for 50 or 60 EUR/month, and I've been quite happy with it too ;-)

You should teach him about backups :)

Thought about it, decided now would be a good time for life to teach him about backups.

I meant by umounting something without telling him, to speed the process along...

Some friends of mine often play prepper games with each other, ranging from "someone just stole all your stuff while you're at the gym...what now" to "your iCloud is compromised and none of the associated devices work, how do you recover"

That's exactly why I wrote a script making it extremely easy to launch an EC2 instance with the last saved game for my 13 year old daughter. I am in the process of turning this into a web service, so if anybody wants to give it a try, let me know.

I was trying to do the same thing - please let me know how your worked. Contact me HackerNews @ OpenDomain dot Org

mail sent.

http://web3dblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/minecraft-game-ser...

4/6 of my previous coworkers played Minecraft, as do both of my brothers. There is a huge unmet demand for reliable game servers that dont'cost a fortune.

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