Game Servers

[ReDuXsGiRl]

What are your expierences with dedicated game servers? What games have you found most popular?

 

[ANMMark]

We run and are planning to relaunch a game server branch of our hosting company.

I'm not personally into gaming, as much as my partner, so it would be a question better asked to him heh

Primarily we're planning to launch a full line of Dual Opterons for CS gaming.

In any case, if you can give a little more detail about the experience you're inquiring about, you may get better responses than mine lol

 

[HostingMethods]

CS seems to be the most popular right now CS S is becoming popular as well. There is not much profit in the game of game servers though. One thing I have found out to help me out the most is provide my customers a game panel of some sort for free. This will save TONS of hours on the technical support of things.

 

[Exon]

Well, I attended a LAN this past weekend - two days, roughly 60 people. CounterStrike: Source was the biggest FPS shooter played, however I spent 90% of the time playing DOTA AllStars. A WarCraft 3: Frozen Throne map. However, WarCraft 3 uses a "listen server" rather than a dedicated.

My guess would be CS Source is in the biggest demand right now.

 

[lv3servers]

I been working with gaming servers for the past 5 years, i was the founder of a very famous company called nationgaming but left due to business reasons. I founded hostdoom with the intentions that the things that happened with nationgaming will not happen here at hostdoom. We hosted all half life mods and just like hostingmethods precised, there is not much profit in gaming servers unless you mass sell which can be difficult without a good system in place (i had one in place for nationgaming and it worked wonders.)

Hope this helps

 

[CServer Hosting]

CS, DoD, and CS:S are by far the most popular games. Perhaps second is BF1942, and Desert Combat(a mod for it)
CS, DoD, and CS:S all require very little space, in comparison with other game engines. A duel Opteron 242 with 2 Gigs of ddr400 memory can hold a maximum of around ~192 users, and costs are around 2-3$ per user. Griffinrun and krypt charge 3-5$. I've determined not to host more than 128 users per server, and not more than 64 users per athlon 64 3200+. The reason I've opted for AMD processors, and definitly 64-bit, is because Valve offers a 64-bit optimized version of hlds.exe Combined with Fedora(because i cant afford Red Hat enterprise), you can fit quite a few people per server. Measuring bandwidth, each player required 4-6 kbps, depending on the mods (adminmod, amxx, amx, statsme, warcraft3, SuperHuman, etc.).

If you want to provide normal services, web hosting, voice hosting (Ventrilo and/or TeamSpeak) is required. Most also want ftp access, for maps, and textures and such.
If public servers are your focus (they cost 30-100% more than private, passworded servers), then unmetered bandwidth from your backbone is a good idea. Private servers are empty more often than not. But either way, during CAL season, some nights are very busy on private servers, and servers cannot be ever close to overloaded on normal times.