Talk to any clan and they are always after the best possible game server provider. But what defines the quality? By looking at a number of points like support, price, ping and the server hardware used.
Price tag
The cost is all relative to everything else when looking. If you go budget then expect no frills and not a lot else. I will say there are some good hosts I would use that are cheap but many I would not at the same time. If you pay more you should get more but this is not always the case. Some will give you more – but do you need it?
Getting help
No one likes thing to break and I for one sure don’t! When things do break we like the reassurance that assistance is on hand. Getting your support should be a secure and easy process when you want it. If it is a hardware issue you do not want middle men. Quite often you find companies rent their dedicated servers from another company, who have resold them, who have rented them from a rack space provider, who rents their racks from a data centre. What is a simple problem can quite often become a real mess. Getting a server from a company that owns their own hardware and rents the rack space directly is miles quicker and easier. Support hours are critical for gamers – they don’t want business hours. Gamers really want support during the afternoons and evenings and especially at weekends not 9 – 5 on weekdays. You end up waiting and twiddling your thumbs while the next working day roles round to get a response for a hand with your Counter-Strike Source server.
Server Hardware
A Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM cracked the job easily 6 years ago but not now. Now you want dual cores minimum and really quads with 4gb of RAM to get a stable server as otherwise lag will plague your game. This is not to say that the companies load their Call of Duty 4 servers relative to what they can take. However a budget provider will over sell, so at 2 in the afternoon things might be fine, but come peak gaming will be unplayable. So do your research and ask for a test server or test IP’s, if you know the companies entire IP range then pop it in Game Monitor and hand pick servers yourself to try.
Network
Gamers always want no lag but this will be almost impossible to do but getting a low ping is best. Game servers hosts will quote you the port speed of the server like 100mbit or 1gbit, but this is not that important. The important number is what speed uplink they have to the internet from their upstream transit provider. Communicating with other servers on the hosts network can be as fast as they like, but if they only have a 10mbit connection out to the internet then it will be slow.
Testimonials
Always check out the testimonials a company has, but also what is not on their website or forums as this can make for interesting reading. Some companies like to be open about testimonials and will leave bad feedback on their forums as they are only human at the end of the day.
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