Dedicated game server hosting

Hello!

As you may see from my signature me and someone else are creating a survival game. We have been at it for about 2 months now and most of the core gameplay is semi-finished. Now in order to move on properly we need to test our current build with multiple players. Now ideally we would need a server that stays up for at least a day or more to fully test all the features including reconnecting and long term stress testing.

Now the question we have is how would we best go about this? I do have a computer at my exposal that isn’t really used, which does have quite decent hardware and an internet connection. So in theory I could setup a dedicated server on that machine and just let it run and update it when needed. But this would only be a temporary solution. As eventually we would need much more servers and provide players the ability to rent their own dedicated servers. Question is, how and where would we as game developpers be able to do this? Are there any recommended services we could use that we can contact or use to setup a few dedicated servers remotely? Webhosts like Multiplay and the likes are nice and all, but I very much doubt they would even consider hosting servers for an unknown game. Where would we start to get things going basically? Should we host them ourselves with our own machines? Or can we do it online using some kind of payment plan?

I’ve looked around and can’t really find any server hosts that provide such a service, all the game hosts i could find provide servers only for the games they have listed.

Cheers

Unless you are prepared to handle things like DDoS attacks, you probably won’t want to host your own servers. Amazon web services is a good start.

You could also look at Digital Ocean or Azure … all of them AWS, Azure, and Digital Ocean have their advantages and disadvantages … so you would need to do research on them and make an informed decision.

AWS all the way - you can get 1 year free, with the proper fire wall configurations there micro system handles multiplayer games very well
azure - staggers and drops a lot of data.

ports open the ports for
unrealengine (TCP/UDP - 7777 and 27015 depending how your game is set up) for all
RDP (TCP 3389) for you and your team by IP
File and print sharing (UDP/TCP 445), for you and your team also

this will allow you to Map the C: of the server as a Shared folder on your local computer by using the \DNSName\c$

just remember to make the Change to Both the Server firewall and the Azure “Nnetwork Security Group”

try https://www.ovh.ie/
best host ive seen since yet.
cheap and works well.

I can provide VPS for you…
For example, 2GB RAM, 10GB HDD, 4 Cores of Xeon with 1.5 or 2.5GHz, 200Mbit/s unlim - 4.5 … 5 USD.

If AWS world is confusing, try IBM Softlayer.

Yeah … if you are getting overwhelmed there than AWS is probably not the right choice for you. There are tons of options and they serve various purposes, so I would probably choose an alternative instead of AWS for now. I prefer using a single dedicated host for my servers … and will use things like replication for the data replication or haproxy for load balancing. I also compile all my dedicated servers for Linux and have written my own game server web-panel to allow potential server hosts to administrate the servers easily.

Just came across this thread and thought this might help. I am using AccuWeb Hosting’s Dedicated server to host this game application and it works great. Their server comes with unlimited DDos protection at the affordable price… You may want to take a look at https://www.accuwebhosting.com/dedicated-servers#game-server

I know this is an old thread but maybe this might help the next person…
Never, again…Never live host a server from your home.Residential internet service is the worse to use for hosting servers. Data centers have redundant back up power and internet resources. If one goes down, another is brought up automatically. Professional games deserve professional servers! Your players will thank you for it.
The biggest issue that I have found with using data centers is the amount of hops it takes to get from the backbone to the server. Regardless of what host you use, you want to make sure they have direct access to the backbone. One hop will be their connection to the backbone and another is the switch to your server (hopefully). With Amazon and Google you shouldn’t have to worry about it as they have direct access.
Most data centers today offer DDOS protection automatically but lets be honest here, even the best protection can not fully stop DDOS. You also need good a linux firewall rules, iptables,and fail2ban to compliment the data center’s protection. I personally prefer bare metal servers with a set monthly rate. If you have an understanding of Linux, I would recommend this route. The last thing you need is a surprise bill because you used to much of something.
If you have a server hosted somewhere, I also recommend using WinMTR (its free just google it) to monitor your server. This will help when you start seeing high ping times, so you can tell if it is the path your signal takes to the server or the server itself.It will show you each hop from your computer to the ip address (or host name) that you enter.
The more hops your signal takes, the more ping time is added.
WinMTR is mainly used to see where you have packet loss. After it runs for a while, say at least 100 pings, you can get an accurate view of where the packets are being dropped. The pings will not affect your server in any way or cause any network lag - if it does, you need a better host with better bandwidth. ‘Unlimited bandwidth’ is a scam.Stay away from them. Everyone is metered regardless of the service provider.
One bad side affect I have found from using WinMTR is finding out your ISP has issues, it is very frustrating as well trying to explain to your ISP that one of their switches is dropping packets because no one understands what your talking about. Where I live it is the only ISP with over 128k speeds so we have no choice in the matter.
Also, for each game we currently have, (non UE games) we have 3 different servers. A web server for website, a game server for the game, and an update server to update clients. Separating these helps reduce lag and bandwidth usage on your game server. (been doing it this way for just over 7 years now)
For intel based servers, you need to make sure that it uses E class processors so you can have memory above 64GB plus it will give you the bonus of more core and threads to use. Now that there are servers available with the AMD Threadripper, we hope to try that out soon for our next project using UE.

I personally recommend Tier.net for server hosting but everyone has their own preferences.