Game servers?

[uninstall.exe]

Who has had game server hosting experience with a third party company, any review or suggestions to who I should go with, I am looking to get a 20 person Counter Strike Source server in Chicago, Ill?

Looking to spend no more then $50 per month if possible.

[ShyguyXPC]

not me personally, but my gaming clan as a whole (operates off of donations from most, rest paid by key members willing to put up remainder of cost each month) goes through Primary Target for Hosting, though thats with a game thats several years old, Joint Operations, but they charge us $120/month for a 64-player server, actually screwing us over on that too, sticking us on a lowly Athlon 64 3200+ CPU & 1GB RAM, BUT... 100+GB of drive space & Windows Server 2003

They Keep claiming since JO is an older game, they try to keep it on older hardware since its less demanding... they pulled the same sh*t last year when they had us on a 1.8GHz Sempron & 1GB RAM with 60GB of drive space... we'd consider up & moving to a new host, but the Website & Teamspeak are also with them, which means rebuilding everything & being out of commission for a couple months... but might be ok, since one of our Australian Members is also hosting a server & website from US somewhere... has better service & hardware (Dual single core Opterons, 2GB RAM, Windows Server 2003, 200+GB of drive space I think, etc, but was paying about same per month as the main servers ) than our main server & site.

For Counter Strike Source should be easy to find someone or company to host from for that price, its a popular high traffic game, so would demand newer reliable hardware etc...

But not sure of anyone else, but with what we've put up with in the last 2-3 years I'd steer clear of Primary Target, incase thats one your looking at. some others may have experienced differently though.

but can't really comment on anything else since CS:S isn't a game we play or host (mainly the Joint Operations Games/Mods with Primary Target, BF2 & 2142/mods through one of the members & their server. and then several MMORPG's, Starcraft, ArmA & a couple of other games, through other members donated hosting)

[techie08]

As per my experience here are the some requirements for a Good Game Server

Game servers dedicated for public consumption often need to be powerful machines. The goal is to provide a positive gaming experience for gamers who choose to play on your servers, and the mechanics should be transparent to them. That means the server has to run the game without a hitch.


As for what kind of hardware you really need, according to Larkin, it depends on the game. "For instance, HLDS, the server that runs all the many mods of Half-Life and Half-Life itself, is extremely CPU intensive. Whereas, BattleField 1942, Unreal Tournament, or even Call of Duty, don't require anywhere near the same hardware requirements, player for player, as do the Half-Life mods."


Pemberton takes a scattergun approach: "We're using a single Pentium 4 3-GHz CPU running in hyperthreading mode and a gigabyte of RAM. That configuration seems to be able to handle any game we've hosted to date."
But you need not re-mortgage your house to afford a machine that will serve up hot games. Elimin8r of TeamArea51 gets away with inexpensive hardware for his Quake 3 Arena servers. "I don't work for a hardware company, so my servers are bought or donated. I host a [Quake 3 Arena capture the flag] server with a 24 max total player limit on a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of Corsair [memory]."
Besides the hardware itself, you've got to contend with bandwidth. "Your server ping is the number one selling point of a good server," said Larkin. "You simply cannot achieve low latency and low ping using DSL or cable, nor can you (for the most part) get the needed upload bandwidth that a game server needs. Dedicated bandwidth is a must."
Ping is used to measure latency. Ping is the amount of time it takes for a packet of information to leave a network appliance such as a PC, bounce off another networking device, and arrive back at its originator. The lower the ping from a game client to a server, the better the online playing experience is.


Thus, consumer Internet connections like cable and DSL might not be sufficient for a popular server. "To run some of our servers I use a wireless T1 line that gives me more upload than DSL and cable," said Chad Case, of the Indoorsmen gaming clan. "I have two of these lines in my home and they get used a lot. Running off DSL or cable means fewer people can join, as DSL is capped at an upload rate and cable fluctuates too much to hold an actual ladder (a match to see who's the superior gamer) or league or match on."

[Fizur2002]

This is going to be your most reliable and best bet. They are not the cheapest around but if you wanted to have one of the fastest servers go here.

Dedicated Hosting - Dedicated Server Web Hosting | Planet Alpha