Backup hosting request while traveling

[Carlo]

I'll likely be going on one of my periodic work trips again soon, this time for a month. The last time it was for two weeks, so I figured it was easiest just to have a campaign break for the duration. I'd rather not do that for a full month, though.

Earlier this year I had tried to set up a third party hosting solution with Citadel Servers, which is the only company publicly offering a NWN:EE turnkey setup, but discovered that it was either a deliberate scam or an example of truly and determinedly awful customer service, since the service as advertised doesn't work (and they admitted that). I eventually got my money back, at least.

Unfortunately, although cloud hosting services in general are cheap, they require you to be pretty knowledgeable about network administrator tasks to set them up properly. There are one or two guides available, but it's far from guaranteed that I'd be able to get it to work.

A much easier solution would be if someone volunteers to temporarily host the module on their computer while I'm traveling. How to do this can be found in the NWC Multiplayer Connection and Hosting Guide, which walks you through the process and doesn't require significant tech skills.

If someone is willing and able to do this, I will send them the latest module file, along with the server vault directory (for the character files) and the campaign database folder. It's just an easy copy/paste job to install those. Of course I'd be available to help with the process and test the server setup.

There's a chance that while traveling, I could still host on my laptop from behind a hotel LAN, in which case the backup hosting won't be needed; the latest version of NWN:EE has some improved network features in that regard. However, I would rate that chance at best 50/50, so a backup arrangement is still important.

Happy to answer any questions.

[Carlo]

In the last couple of days, since I figured it was worth trying, I taught myself enough cloud computing and ubuntu to set up a Linux cloud server instance for NWN:EE. So Westgate will be hosted there from now on. It's located in the eastern US, so there should also be less lag in general.

[Jaokith]

Very cool. Thanks for the effort.