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As for the money thing, it's less than 9 dollars a month if you rent for a year. That's less than most people pay for website hosting. PLUS you get a platform that's been developed for years to be stable, a custom scripting engine, unlimited storage for your graphics, and a remote admin tool to manage it all from.
This is not even counting the resources required on their end, like hosting costs, having powerful enough computers to run your npcs without "lagging" which everybody would whine about, and space in the datacenter to keep your server online 99% of the time; even those rare outages are the computers failing, not Graal shutting it down. Count yourself lucky there aren't any "scheduled maintenance" periods for the database to be compacted which would save them money by taking your server offline for 2 hours a day. Other companies do it and get away with it every day.
I don't dabble in finances, but for all those reasons I suspect Graal servers are very much like game consoles, I think they're sold at a loss. I would imagine they require a few account upgrades, much like game title sales, to break even on costs.
There isn't even a setup fee, like for most web hosting companies. That alone, if it's your first year, saves you what most people charge 50 dollars to do. If you factor in 50 dollars being the cost of setting up your space, you're paying a whopping 4 dollars a month.
99 dollars a year is not a lot of money. I pay over 99 dollars every month just for car insurance. I get nothing from that unless I get in an accident. Even if you're not driving yet, and don't have a job, how much do your parents usually spend on your birthday or for the holidays? Tell them you want to rent a server as a present which will bring you joy for the next year. How many presents do you really use all year anyway? I can think of ... one, my old computer, which I didn't buy.
Lastly, this pseudo political drama is stupid. Nobody's forcing you to rent a server, and if you "don't want to support them" then don't rent one. Period. You can't be a political snob and a playerworld renter at the same time, so chose.
Graal is a business, it's not going to give you an account and space which costs them money just to be friendly. If you want it, pay for it, otherwise, don't make a server. Simple. |
12-06-2006, 10:08 PM
Linear Mode
