Sunday, April 3, 2011

What Makes A Top Class Gameserver Company

By Trisha Dave Pearson


Gamers and clans will be constantly looking for better game server providers. But what defines the quality? By looking at a number of points like support, price, ping and the server hardware used.

Price tag

Price is all relative to the rest of the defining points. If you go budget then expect no frills and not a lot else. Don't get me wrong there are some excellent cheap hosts but also some I would not touch if you paid me! At the same time just because you pay more don't expect the service and quality to be higher most of the times. It will be - but do you need it to be?

Getting help

I certainly do not enjoy things going wrong. When things do break we like the reassurance that assistance is on hand. When it comes to support you want a swift response and for that response to come when you are wanting 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. Renting from companies who rent directly from the datacentre is always easier and quicker. Hours of support are critical - you want gamer's hours not business hours. Gamers really want support during the afternoons and evenings and especially at weekends not 9 - 5 on weekdays. Otherwise you end up waiting until the next working day to get a response and you are left with a broken server for a hand with your Counter-Strike Source server.

Hardware

Single core processors may well of done the job fine five years ago not now. The way forward is quad cores but a dual core processor is still good - look for 4gb of RAM to make sure your game stays lag free. This doesn't necessarily mean companies are loading their COD4 servers relative to what they can take. Over selling servers is a thing that budget providers do and so at peak times expect the quality to be lacking. Do some home work and ask the host for a test server or test IP but find out the IP range they have and look it up on game monitor and choose some servers yourself to test.

Connection

We all want negative pings but it will never happen but the lower the better. A game hosting company will talk about what connection the server has to their own network like 100mbit but this is not important. It's what the link between their core switch to their upstream transit provider is. The server can communicate as fast as it likes with the other servers on the hosts network but if it's only got a 10mbit connection to the internet then things will be slow going.

Feedback

Search the internet for testimonials as well as the company's website as they 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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