Gamers and clans will be constantly looking for better game server providers. What is quality? Well a wide range of things like price, support, ping and network and server hardware.

The price

Price is only relative to what you get from a company. If you choose to pay peanuts expect to get that back in quality. I will say there are some good hosts I would use that are cheap but many I would not at the same time. People say if you pay more then you get better quality and this is often the case but with game servers is not always true.

Support

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. When it comes to support you want a swift response and for that response to come when you are wanting it. Should it turn out to be hardware then middle men are a nightmare. 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. That was a simple example but the long string of companies can make things very complex. So you want to speak to the hosting company who will then deal with it as otherwise you can be waiting days. 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. As otherwise you are sat waiting for the next working day to get your issue looked at and possibly fixed. for aid with your Counter-Strike Source 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. Though don’t think a company is loading their Call of Duty 4 hosting 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

People want no lag but this will never happen – getting as low as possible is the aim. Companies all go on about each game server on a 100mbit or 1gbit port etc. This is not the important number. It’s what the link between their core switch to their upstream transit provider is. This is because the server might be able communicate with the other servers they host quickly but if they only have a 10mbit connection to the internet it may be a little 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. Many companies are taking to leaving any poor feedback on their forums to say yes we are human and made mistakes etc.