Minecraft Server, What to do? Oh what to do? Options

[Aki]

Hullo to those of you already sucked into that psychologists wet dream known as "Minecraft" or "pleasure through monotony" (as I like to refer to it). Hello also to those of you that wish to view our dirty habit and aim your stinkbombs of scorn at us, firing wildly from afar! Welcome one, welcome all!

Ok so ... I'm addicted ... and we have currently got our wonderful Leborn hosting our Sneaky Monkey Utopia server. This is pure awesomeness.

However the server can only really be accessed when Leborn brings it online (this makes cold turkey happen in me, don't know about anyone else). I feel its unfair to demand Leborn keep this server online 24/7 just so at 5am I can drunkenly marvel at my 1M cubed architectural monstrosities of the day and reluctantly drag myself away from my cubist paradise.

I offer the alternative.

I can host.

My PC is on 24/7.

It gets turned off where there is a power cut/system fail/important update/coffee incident ... um ... and that's it pretty much.

Now the issues are, should you wish to take me up on this offer:

1. How can I make sure my PC is secure if I'm opening ports? I'm willing to do this but only if my security can be maintained so I'm unsure about what processes are involved here.

2. This would mean us either starting a new world server or finding some way of exporting our current world to me and installing it on my PC to run as a server. I have no idea how we might go about that.


I'm only posting this so that officially we can all get our good ideas down in text for us all to knock around

[Chisel]

The problem seems to be CPU usage more than anything else, I tried hosting on my old web server which has a great connection, RAM and HDD space but it absolutely slaughtered the CPU, seeing if I can upgrade it as I've been meaning to for ages anyway, will take a while as I've got a couple of TB of data to transfer though so something else in the mean time would be good unless someone has a better option.