Brontesaurus Blog

I have created a AWS EC2 AMI with a couple source dedicated servers installed on it. Lately I’ve been using EC2 to start on demand game servers for whenever my friends and I want a private server to play on with the settings we all like. 

This image is based on Amazon’s Fedora Core 8 32bit Official image. The latest HLDS update tool and Day of Defeat Source, Counter-Strike Source, and Team Fortress 2 games are installed with example server.cfg files for each game.

AMI Id: ami-7906e110

Manifest: fc8-srcds-01/image.manifest.xml

readme.txt:

This is the source dedicated server EC2 image.

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Find updates and information at http://brontesaurus.com

All source ds servers are in /home/steam

Installed Games:
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* Team Fortress 2
* Counter-Strike Source
* Day of Defeat Source

Running Day of Defeat Source Server
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Dods Config Files: /home/steam/hlds/orangebox/dod/cfg

To start the server:
* cd /home/steam/hlds/orangebox
* ./srcds_run -game dod

Ex: ./srcds_run -game dod -secure +maxplayers 24 +exec server.cfg

Running Team Fortress 2 Server
========================
TF Config Files: /home/steam/hlds/orangebox/tf/cfg

To start the server:
* cd /home/steam/hlds/orangebox
* ./srcds_run -game tf

Ex: ./srcds_run -game tf -secure +maxplayers 24 +map cp_dustbowl +exec server.cfg

Running Counter-Strike Source Server
========================
CS:S Config Files: /home/steam/hlds/cstrike/cfg

To start the server:
* cd /home/steam/hlds
* ./srcds_run -game cstrike

Ex: ./srcds_run -game cstrike +maxplayers 24 +map de_dust +exec server.cfg

Amazon EC2 just rolled out a new sudo pre-payment plans for all its instance sizes. With this new plan you pay a flat up front fee for a one or three year term. In exchange for this pre-payment you receive discounted per-hour price. A lot of people are using EC2 as a permanent web host and dont need to scale up like other services with possibly hundreds of instances being created or terminated at any given time. So what Amazon did here was give their consistent users a break with this new pricing structure.

This is a table with the pre-payment fees and what discount you get with them.

Actual costs. Pre-payment 1/3 year vs none.

Currently the reserved instance pricing is only available for Linux/Unix instances.

[Via Techcrunch]