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Game Server Hosting – Ping or Die

August 23, 2010 / coklat posted in Counter Strike / No Comments

Game servers are usually developed in a form of a standard component that can be found in many games that have a multiplayer option. After this kind of business became popular, hosting companies immediately responded to the growing demand and started offering dedicated servers for online gaming to both those who want to make business and to those who are simply enthusiastic. Generally game server hosting caters to two main groups of online games – those available from the main server, and those that operate through a series of distributed ones.

Centralized servers are mostly often used to host games that require these servers to be able to host thousands of users playing at the same time. The main server stores all the necessary data about the game environment and the cyber world is there 24 hours 7 days a week. The game goes on no matter if the user is online or offline. To participate in the game, a player usually needs special client software that connects to the main server. One of the most popular game using the technology of centralized servers is the World of Warcraft.

Another model is the distributed servers technology. This one is usually utilized by enthusiasts and small businesses. In this model the software is distributed onto several dedicated game servers. As an example, real-time strategies are usually based on this technology. They need frequent updates of the game world that is executed through messaging between users and servers. There should be a master server in this chain to control messaging between the whole bunch of distributed servers. Low latency and fast ping time – that is what needed for this model to be successful and ensure the fast speed of messages reaching the server and coming back to the user. Users usually choose servers with the best ping rates and connect to them to play online. That is why game server hosting companies connect their servers to the fastest networks. Security, operating system and applications tweaking and thorough configuration are also very important.

Hosting providers usually supply their clients with game server hosting services that include the most technologically advanced servers and network connections, very often with the preinstalled software to start online gaming business immediately. The most popular games using the technology of distributed servers are: Doom 3, Medal of Honor, Halo, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Quake 3 etc.

Game server hosting providers are expected to significantly increase their revenue due to such rapid growth figures of online gaming. Many hosting companies have already build up a wide range of special game server hosting offers including even those for $30-40 a month. This is significantly cheaper than many low-performance dedicated servers.

Orgins of online game server hosting

February 1, 2010 / coklat posted in Counter Strike / No Comments

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.