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Game Servers use something called a dedicated server application. This dedicated server app is a program specifically designed to collect data from each player and redistribute it, as necessary, to the other players in the game. This is much more efficient and effective than a peer-to-peer arrangement, but it requires a separate computer to host the server application. And this new computer is not a game machine. It is a server machine. It has very special needs. To effectively host and support a game server, you must know every aspect of its inner workings, which include both the hardware and software within the system.

One of the most popular games available is Counter-Strike, The Half-life engine can be run on many different operating systems, but the primary bottleneck on your server’s performance is always bandwidth—how much data you can move into or out of your computer at once. Most users that buy and play these games are using a “broadband internet service,” the most popular of which are DSL and cable. With a DSL or cable modem connection, a player can host his or her own dedicated server application, but with this kind of a connection the server can only “serve” a few people at a time, usually between four and ten. A server with better internal hardware—a faster processor or more memory—might improve these numbers a little, but the tightest bottleneck is still network bandwidth, and cable and DSL have their limits.

In the past, this is how the majority of game servers were hosted. This was the only option. The player would buy the game, and most households only had one computer, so the player would use this one machine host his or her server and play the game on, often simultaneously. The stress on the computer was enormous, and game performance was proportionately dismal. Even if the bandwidth on the newest broadband internet services could keep up with the load, the computer itself was still behind in computing the data needed. The capacity to process data for 3D graphics, game physics, sorting and distributing network data to the other players on one computer, especially back then, simply could not do it.

When online gaming finally hit it’s stride, Leagues, LAN events, and dedicated teams—with members scattered all around the world were created, the gamers started looking for something better, a solution to the server dilemma. They needed something with the power to smoothly host the game, faster and more reliably. They needed a solution that would give them true performance, with latency return in tens of milliseconds (rather than hundreds or thousands) for all their team members in games of up to twenty players. And more. Thirty. Forty. Sixty. The player count is still rising, even to this day, thanks to ambitious game designers.

The solution was obvious. Use a professional server. A computer designed to read data and transmit vast amounts of data as fast as players need it. A handful of game hosting pioneers such as defconservers.com realized the need for such systems. They purchased rack mounted server machines and colocated them within datacenters to host their games. They paid between $200 and $700 a month for this luxury, and the teams that could foot such bills were few and far between, but the lucky ones were utterly amazed at the improvement to gameplay. Within a few years online multiplayer gaming became a huge success. Prices over the years have lowered dramatically and subscribers increased 1000 fold.