Minecraft Servers - Bandwidth and Speeds
A business partner and I have been looking at setting up some servers for a couple of other reasons, and someone got us looking at Minecraft hosting - and perhaps some other games as well. Both of us have run game servers before, and both have run small MC servers for friends, etc. The hardware needed is understood (bah on Java) and we understand the software packages we'd want to use for panels, etc, and are doing market research on pricing, and we know that the market's saturated.
Hopefully the above paragraph can kill some of the 'there are too many GSPs, hardware specs are high, go look at these threads' responses.
What I'm wondering is this: What kind of internet connection are we discussing here? What I'm understanding is that as far as upload speeds, minecraft necessitates around .25Mbps for every concurrent player.
So, if you hosted a box that had the capacity (using a bunch of different server instances) of hosting say, 300 slots (maybe over 10-20 game servers) then in order to allow for max load, you'd need somewhere in the ballpark of an upload speed of 75Mbps.
Is that accurate? In my area, the highest speeds that the (only) cable ISP for businesses will discuss is 50 down / 8 up. In my business associate's area I believe the limit was somewhere around 100/20 although I could be wrong.
So... what kind of connection are these facilities running?
We also looked at VPS and dedicated rentals, but the rental costs seem to outweigh any profits at all and we'd much rather invest in the equipment itself, as it can be reused for all sorts of ventures.
Thanks in advance for your time and thoughts!