Hosting for GGZ Gaming Zone project?

Could anyone host a server for the GGZ Gaming Zone project? It is used within GNOME, KDE (and others) to allow players to compete via the internet. They (GGZ) have been awarded with a server donation at the most recent grant round in December 2007. The server will be provided by Sun Microsystems Nederland. The specifications aren’t yet available.

Right now they have access to a hardly saturated 2 MBit/s line. This is because all of the games are turn-based with few events. In addition, the traffic includes some chat messages and some web page retrievals. The traffic usage will increase as GGZ plans to offer Freeciv pubserver hosting . Unfortunately the old pubserver has crashed and old traffic data is not available. If needed, Josef might be able to get some traffic estimates.

GGZ doesn’t have a preferred hosting location. USA/Canada/EUR should be fine; GGZ has users from USA/Canada as well as Europe.

Can you help GGZ? If so, please send an email to Josef Spillner (josef AT ggzgamingzone DOT org).

And some background information from Josef explaining why hosting this server would be a good idea:

Now, why is it worth to host the GGZ server? We think that casual gaming on Linux is not yet attractive enough to many users. There’s the classic chicken-and-egg issue of needing prosperous communities first before this will get some momentum on their own. We successfully managed to lure many cards players off Microsoft’s MSN gaming site in 2006 due to their increasingly restrictive policies and advertisement flooding, but didn’t at that time have the right tools for admin and host players to govern their clubs and tournament participants. This led to many of them leaving again after some time to other (proprietary) sites. Now the tooling has improved, and we would like to lure them again.

Both the cards players and freeciv have strong self-organised player communities. With GGZ’s infrastructure and tooling available, we would like to cover them and also reach out for KDE and GNOME gamers. GGZ support in the respective software has been added over recent months and is now ready for prime-time.