Spring RTS Engine

I'm finishing a new release of my game and want to setup a few auto-hosts for it in a week or so.

Do people run SPADS on their home PC or use separate PCs or VPS.

Is it a good idea to use a cheap VPS with linux to run the hosts?

How resource intensive is running an auto-host compared to normally hosting a spring game?

Is it a good idea to use a cheap VPS with linux to run the hosts?

Yes - many do. If you have a spare perma-online home PC that obviously works too.

How resource intensive is running an auto-host compared to normally hosting a spring game?

Very un-intensive, because you would normally use spring-dedicated on an autohost, which is just message passing and runs no simulation/gfx.

Yes, basically.

However, note that many autohosts can use up a considerable amount of memory. But in terms of CPU and bandwidth they are not intensive at all.

I was running semprini for a while on my old Ferrari 3400 laptop, with a wifi connection, and it worked fine for us playing. That's a laptop from 2001 or so :)