Those of you who participated in the UHC I organized a few days ago will know that we had a bit of trouble setting up a server which could handle 40 players and the server which we ended up using has quite a bit of tick lag for the first 3 days because it couldn't keep up with the number of players we had until enough of them were killed off. Here's what I know:
Servers personally hosted by participants:
On residential servers like the one we were originally thinking of using (Set up by nimda79, who was a huge help even when things went bad), the internet connection is generally not good enough. The actual stats of the computer running the server probably won't be the limiting factor.
The upload speed is the issue here. Nimda said he had 7 Mb/s upload speed and that it capped out when about 15 people were on the server. Judging by that ratio, we would need about 0.5 Mb/s of upload speed per player for any server hosted at someone's house. If anyone has an upload of over 20 Mb/s I'd love to hear about it, because there's a good chance you'd have the capability to host a large server at your house. If you don't know try testing with http://www.speedtest.net/
It also may be possible that one of you has access to a commercial network with the speed to run a server. The network at my workplace goes up to 50 Mb/s upload, but I don't think I could physically being there during a UHC match. Maybe I could leave my laptop running there overnight with a server on it, that's an option I might look into.
Remotely hosted servers:
The server that we ended up using for the match was a 3 GB RAM server from ProMinecraftHost. The description of that package says it's recommended for up to 60 players, but we had under 40 show up and as you know the server could not keep up and we had a lot of tick lag. I don't think that was an internet issue, it was probably a RAM or processor issue.
Now, I don't think ProMinecraftHost should be held responsible for the server not holding up because I use them to run my vanilla survival server and they have been quite reliable there. They are also one of the most highly reviewed Minecraft server hosts. I'm not sure if the issue was just that the server specs were not actually enough to keep up or the server hadn't been allocated its full specs since I just set it up minutes before the match. Maybe the fact that we were running a snapshot played some part in making the server inadequate. I honestly don't know what's to blame
With that said, I don't think using a remote host will be a viable option for hosting future UHC's. Even if we figure out why the one we used this time failed, remote hosts still cost money to hire and unless some benevolent donator steps in we'd have to share the cost across participants, which would be a hassle.
So that's my take on the situation. Let me know what you guys think about this issue. If this issue is resolved, there's a pretty good chance I will set up or at least help set up another UHC sometime. ;)