MWEB announces Minecraft servers available for rental

MWEB GameZone in partnership with Multiplay have announced that the MWEB Cape Town data centre will now host rental services for Minecraft. Multiplay is a UK based gaming services provider that has been in operation since 1997.

Through Multiplay, users can host Minecraft and Voice Comms (Mumble, TeamSpeak 3, Ventrilo) services. Those hosting a Minecraft server are also offered discounts on Voice Comms services.

Server pricing comes in from R100 per month, although it is worth noting that the prices are listed in British Pounds. Discounts are given for 3 month (10%), 6 month (15%) and 12 month (20%) rental periods.

The Minecraft servers feature:

Solid State Disks (SSD);
FTP Access;
Low RAM prices;
Bukkit Support;
24/7 Support.

We caught up with MWEB’s online gaming manager, Desmond Kurz, to find out a bit more about the service.

“This is the first dedicated Minecraft rental service that MWEB has provided to the gaming public in that the server is custom-built for the specific requirements of hosting Minecraft,” said Kurz. “Minecraft is incredibly I/O intensive, for example, which is why these servers have Solid State Drives (SSD).”

We asked how Multiplay services differ from simply hosting directly with MWEB. “Multiplay is one of the global leaders in game server hosting, so they provide 24/7 support and billing services which we don’t offer at present. Rather than developing those ourselves, its a “best-of-breed” partnership similar to our partnership with Gameservers.com,” said Kurz.

Speaking of the partnership with Multiplay, Kurz said “We sought them out originally to provide the Battlefield Play4Free and Battlefield Heroes public servers for South African gamers. These we launched in partnership with them a couple of months ago.”

Multiplay has indicated that they are looking to launch other games in SA soon, and we asked Kurz about MWEB’s roll in this: “Like all partnerships, we will always be on the lookout for mutually beneficial hosting arrangements. From a next step point of view, we would potentially look at offering SA gamers the opportunity to rent their own Battlefield Play4Free and Battlefield Heroes servers, if there is a demand for this,” concluded Kurz.