We’re about to begin a pre-alpha phase of testing the FPS we’ve been putting together, and I was wondering if anyone had any pointers as to which companies offer the most reasonable deals and bang for buck on American and European based dedicated servers.
We’re attempting to host single game sessions for 3-5 hours and are keen to host up to 100 players on a 3km x 3km map. It would be great to see recommendations or to look at the performance and number of connections achieved.
I know the answer to these questions are highly scalable and have unique modifiers, however any anecdotes or experience would be really helpful. I’ve searched the forums and haven’t found a lot of information.
EDIT:
European: Leaseweb
It looks like Leaseweb are going to be one of the most viable options. I’m attempting to get quotes and work out how many players will be able to join the session.
Are you able to share the specs (type of game, number of connections etc) and the pricing? Basically any information that would help me to benchmark would be great.
I have looked at Kaboom Arena, could you give me some sort of estimate as to the players/price ratio? What plan do you have, and how many players does it work for?
I am using Linode (at work) and Digital Ocean (personal).
Both are very comparable, I found Linode better for my work environment due to their support and Digital Ocean for my personal environment due to their flexibility and ‘developer’ focus.
Both will do the job and are very affordable.
Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure are also good candidates but I found the setup and finding the right configuration more daunting so I skipped them.
(When I first started with a dedicated server I just needed something quick to start testing)
Once your project goes bigger and ‘live’ you probably do want to go towards Amazon or Microsoft due to better scale-ability.
I am able to spin up pre-made instances through my Game Flow system by using their APIs and I only get charged for the time the image is up and running (minimum 1 hour). It is also easier for me to develop for their systems, because they run standard Linux images, so I created a Virtual Box image of the same specifications, make sure my game runs, and then I am guaranteed that it will run on their services.
Currently Kaboom Arena is designed to run 8 players networked, I am actually successfully running this off a $5.00 server … although I prefer to get a $20.00 server and run 3 or 4 instances off there instead.
I have done some preliminary tests with FPS games and I can get a 16 player server running quite effectively on a $10.00 server … I could push this up to 32 players on a $20.00 server. Obviously I need to run more tests, but this is in essence what my initial testing has proven.
We use Amazon for a lot of stuff too. I have experience with Lineode in the past as well. Both have their advantages for sure, but lately we’ve been using Amazon more.
For low-latency twitch game, I find that the “noisy neighbor” problem on Amazon, and the “virtualization jitter” problem with cloud providers in general, has been too much to deal with, and I’d recommend renting a “root” server of your own (not virtualized.)
These typically cost between $50 and $500 per month, depending on how fancy/big you want them to be.
Amazon is great if you need to rent a server for half a day, though. As long as you get lucky on your neighbors and the virtualization doesn’t decide to go all jitter on you, it can be quite alright.
Note that, if all you’re doing is renting a server for a few hours every now and then, you don’t need to worry about the API; just spin up an AMI with the game you want to host, using the manual console API.
Most of what I say about Amazon above is equally true (or more) about other virtual cloud hosts (Linode, DO, Rackspace, etc)
Unfortunately, dedicated servers are a dying breed, as all the providers are going virtualized or containerized or both
Hey man, we’re really interested in using DigitalOcean as well, but our we keep getting timeouts when connecting to the servers. Are you using the steam connections or are you making your own?
