I've recently thought of hosting... But I'm curious about a few things
1. Is it easy enough to learn how to host with adequite time.
2. If players would be interested in donating money to my server in exchange for priveleges in the game ex. credits, observer acount for a certain amount of time, planets with citedels, or special ships. (This is a hypothetical question to see if I could make up my losses for starting a server this is not an obligation at all.)
3. Buying stuff for certain games such as mentioned above.
4. What it would take to bring people in
5. Will a cable modem work decently to host
6. Does the cpu have to be on for server to run
7. Can my ip adress be hacked

thanx for your input in advance

1. Yes it is quite easy to host but to be able to design and creat good games for your player is sometimes tough
2.The donating money thing i wouldnt expect anyone to do so because games are usally very short and are not worth the investimate of reall money plus giving observer status would totally ruin the game
3.Read 2
4.Good games and listen to your players request and maybe a nice website. make sure ppl know your here post on forums and websites
5.yes a cable modem will work as long as it has enough availble bandwidth meaning you can be downloading something while players are online
6.Yes you need to have the computer on and connected to the internet for the server to run
7.Yes as always it can be hacked but if you setup your firewall to be passive to certain signatures it will be harder for them

If you do start serving great its a labor of love cause 99% of the ppl that do post put lots of money into with little return other then the satisfaction of doing something for the TW community
enjoy