How Game Servers Are Maintained And What Game Server Hosts Will Help You With

Luckily I am able to speak in great detail about game servers, having hosted them for eight years! Having seen good and bad game server providers, I’ve also seen the the bad and the ugly. There are better practises for running a game server host, and very bad ones. Let’s look at the way in which game servers operate.

Gameserver support for different operating systems is normally very good. The majority always run on Windows. CSS servers as an example happily run on Windows and Linux servers. There are however some games that only run on Windows. The majority of game server hosts run Windows 2003 Server. There’s a divide on what operating system is best. Purist game server providers (at least that’s the best way of describing them) will cough at the thought of running gameservers on Windows, unless there is really no Linux support. Linux is indeed thought to be more stable. Linux is always considered to be smoother and more secure. There is always the option to run Wine on Linux, which emulates Windows. Although do bear in mind that Wine isn’t the real deal, i.e. Windows itself.

So why do people rent game servers from GSP’s? Why not rent your own dedicated server and run the games? Perhaps if you are an experienced server admin. Let’s imagine you are going to run your game servers on Linux. The security including patching of the server will be down to you. If the dedicated server breaks, you are going to need to know how to mend it. If not, it is going to cost you to pay the provider to fix or format the server for you. Of course knowing what you are doing, and not chowning the Linux operating system to another user generally helps!

A game server host will spend all their hours fixing mods on your behalf. Mods and addons are developed by members of the gaming community. Thus is is worth considering they are not being professionally developed, and have their fair share of bugs. We all knows Team Fortress 2 servers always break when there is a Steam update. You then have to wait for the mod makers to release a patch. It isn’t much fun- while the server is down expect lots of trouble!

A good game server host will take care of all of the above. They deal with all the hassle for you. Given how cheap game servers are these days, you may as well pay a provider anyway. Happy fragging!

For CSS servers, visit INX-Gaming . INX also specialise in providing game servers.

Tags: game servers, Hobby