AThostik (AntiTalent GTA SA:MP Server Hosting) project was an attempt to run and maintain several GTA San Andreas Multiplayer (GTA SA:MP) dedicated server for Windows. At the time, I had access to one public IPv4 address, thus the servers were accessible from the Internet easily. The project was operational in the years 2009–2010.
Public website was built on PHP-Fusion CMS framework. It was used for writing various articles, news about hosting, notifying about outages, planned maintainence tests and for publishing them servers themselves. Another site, admin panel (by Bloodman), was deployed side-by-side with the public site. Admin panel had been used by server owners to self-maintain their servers — edit server name/title, max number of players per server, game mode, etc.
The connection itself was async ADSL connection, thus the upstream had been very low, maybe 1 Mbps at max. Hosting was free for everyone, but the reliability was low as well. Outages were pretty common, as the connection was broken on daily basis. It is very possible, that that IPv4 address had been an easy target for DoS/DDoS attacks.
dockerized sa:mp server
Some time ago, I was wondering if one could be able to run old SA:MP 0.3.7 servers using Docker engine. So I proceeded and gave it a try, read some articles about it and made the first build. It took me some other time to work out the working state of the container, I optimized (could be optimized more) the setup and publish it as GitHub repository:
One is now able to run SA:MP Linux dedicated servers in containers; the repository contains also one python script for server visiblity and reachability testing with possible RCON commands to be passed too.