by New update to solve long queues!
During the past 4 years, we’ve faced a lot of challenges like low revenue, high costs, bugs, and missing features. After lots of hard work, bug fixes, and adding new features, We’ve managed to make most operations super fast—from over 10 seconds to under 1 second, sometimes even less than 100ms! This has helped us cut costs and improve revenue, but we still face the same big issue: low revenue compared to high costs. Our current business model, which includes 4/6 hour renewals, just isn’t cutting it. After testing and implementing many different strategies, it became clear that we needed to make this change which we left as a last resort.
We’ve run some stats and found that, on average, we have 40-60 players per 150-200 servers. Many users start a server, use it once or never join it, and then forget about it, which leads to long queue times and wasted resources. This takes away space from other people who want to run a server and play with their friends.
So, here’s the plan: we’re adding an expiration for player inactivity. After you renew your server, if no player joins within 30 minutes (or 1h with ads), the server will expire, and you’ll need to renew it again. If a player joins, the timer resets to 30 minutes every minute. We know this might upset some of you, but it’s necessary to keep FreeMcServer alive and provide better service for everyone. We are expecting this new update to reduce queue times.
We’ll monitor this new system and tweak both player inactivity and server timers as needed, potentially extending the server timer from 4/6 hours to 6/8 or even more if things get better.
Questions you might have:
- Are you removing the old renew timer?
Nope. It stays. Your server will still expire in 4/6 hours regardless of player activity. We don’t want to play a cat-and-mouse game with users.
- Will this apply to all server variants?
Yes, except for proxies.
- Why not add more nodes/locations to fix the long queues?
Adding new nodes is expensive, and with our current revenue, it’s not possible. Hence, this change is necessary.
- Will this apply to upgraded servers?
No, upgraded servers will not expire during the upgrade.