^TUTORIAL
Welcome to MCServerHost

We decided to create this section in an attempt to inform the community on the best practices for managing your MCServerHost server. This section will be written in the same way blog pages are written and will be written by people associated with the project. We will attempt to use simple grammar to make the community page accessible to users that don’t speak English as their primary language.

A Heartfelt Thank You

Firstly we want to thank everyone for being a part of the MCServerHost project, this website has been in the works for many months and we greatly appreciate the level of enthusiasm we have received from our users. We have received lots of feedback and have implemented many features based on suggestions from users, let’s take some time to go through these.

The Beginning of Something Great

On the 14th of October 2024 we made our first public announcement, immediately we were met with much more enthusiasm than we could ever have imagined. In the days following our first announcement our discord server grew to over 1000 users and the post received over 400 reactions, this was absolutely mindblowing to us and we cannot thank you enough.

Building the Community Together

On the 17th of October we opened our public chats, by this time we had gained over 2000 new users and everyone had the chance to share their idea for the perfect Minecraft hosting platform, from this we received multiple suggestions:

- Make the platform accessible to people all over the world.

- Make signup easy, allow people to use their username from Minecraft and use their Minecraft skin as an avatar for their account.

- Allow people to create servers in a popup menu with several simple steps, along with a big create server button at the end and allow people to upgrade and cancel servers just as easily.

We immediately got to work as this gave us an idea for where to take the project. Let me share with you some initial progress on the styling and the different design choices we had to make to get to where we are now.

Designing the Perfect Look

A Few Logo Attempts

A few of our logo attempts, in order:

Before we got to this initial styling we already went through countless different ideas and ways to formulate how we felt about this project, but we ended up with our logo as it exists today and we don’t think it could have been any more perfect. In a not-so-sneaky way the logo represents the king of server hosting, and this was exactly the product we were hoping to create.

Landing Page Styling

Then we started thinking about styling for the landing page and login pages, we had a very rough start here and weren’t really sure at all which direction to go with. We wanted everything to look unique to our now established brand but didn’t want to overdo the same color too much or make the page feel boring. Here’s some initial designs for our landing page:

As you can see there are some similarities between the page we ended up with and the initial attempts, we sticked with this design until we found a good match for a login page and decided to rebase the landing page based on the final design of the login screen, here’s some attempts at perfecting this:

Perfecting the Login Page

I think the login page definitely takes the spot for most retries. We only linked 6 examples here for the different ways we tried designing this but I think we must have redesigned this page at least 15 times before ending up with the final example. After this was finished we went back to the landing page and redesigned it entirely, and included a smooth transition effect where the cave moves to the other side of the screen and the login field appears, clever eh?

Crafting the Dashboard

As this gave us a generalized theme to follow, the rest of the dashboard followed quite smoothly, we made a list of all the sections the dashboard should include and went to work. First coming up with the design for the server list, the settings menu, the billing tab - then the server page which includes the dashboard, console, file manager and many other sections, here are some initial design sneak peeks from this stage:

As you can tell, much of the initial design ended up making it into the final product, but merely designing all different pages and coming up with where to put what and how to order different sections took upwards of a month to finish. We are very pleased with the result and think the design you see today is exactly what we were aiming for and exactly what you were expecting from us, and from the hundreds of messages we have received complimenting our panel, we can tell you definitely agree!

The Hardware Behind the Magic

Then came the hard part, we had a well-designed frontend but still had to get our hands dirty to create the actual product. In order to make MCSH possible, we needed a lot of hardware and a good location to place it.

After some careful planning, we decided to purchase 10 extremely powerful servers. We didn’t just stop there though. We wanted full control over the environment these servers would run in, so we built our own server room from scratch.

We installed a fiber connection to make sure everything was as fast as possible, set up the electricity to handle the load, and created a cooling system to keep the servers at a stable temperature. We patched every cable ourselves, tested all the equipment, and made sure everything was working exactly as it should.

Now we have a server room that we built with our own hands. It runs all the Minecraft servers for our users and gives us the performance and reliability we needed to make this project happen. Seeing it all come together was worth every bit of effort.

Crafting the Backend for Scalability

With the hardware side sorted, the next challenge was getting the backend software to work the way we needed. This wasn’t just about setting up some scripts and calling it a day. We had to create our own system to handle communication between the individual nodes and the website stack.

This was no small task. Each server needed to talk to the platform in real time, and we had to make sure everything worked seamlessly no matter how many users were online. To do this, we built a custom solution from the ground up. This included creating a TCP load balancer that could handle traffic across 15 locations around the world.

The load balancer doesn’t just distribute traffic randomly. It makes smart decisions about where to send users based on latency, server load, and availability. This ensures the best possible experience no matter where in the world someone is connecting from.

We also set everything up to scale. The system is designed to handle tens of thousands of Minecraft servers, and we’ve tested it to make sure it can handle spikes in traffic without breaking a sweat. Every piece of this setup is built with the future in mind, so we’re ready to grow as the community does.

Building this backend was one of the most challenging parts of the project, but also one of the most rewarding. Seeing everything work together perfectly, from the hardware in our server room to the traffic balancing across the globe, makes it all worth it.