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I am new to colocation. I am looking for a good place to host my server that would have around 5-10 Source Servers (Team Fortress 2). I am looking at maybe around 90 players at a time for now, players coming from all over the United States

Could I get more info on what I am suppose to look for exactly? Would it be correct for me to get a 100Mb/s line and does 100Mb/s line in the following example actually be 100Mb/s upload bandwidth? Example: package 4 of FDC's services:

http://www.fdcservers.net/server_colocation.php

also I want to get something unmettered. I do not want to have to ever worry about going over some bandwidth limit or any DDOS attacks killing me.

And if anyone has any other recommendations as to what network configurations I should get or any other good colocation providers that are cheap in price, I would REALLY appreciate the help.

So my questions are:

  1. What should I look for in colocation for hosting about 5-10 game servers on one box?
  2. Is an unmetered 100Mb/s line actually 100Mb/s upload rate?
  3. Would a 100Mb/s line be adequate for my use?
  4. How could I check the latencies of the data center before buying their services?

Thanks, I really appreciate the help.

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  • I would suggest Linode for this, assuming you weren't planning on buying hardware. Jan 4, 2011 at 17:18
  • I need to avoid virtualization for what I am doing
    – Linuz
    Jan 4, 2011 at 17:21
  • Why avoid virtualization? I run ALL my game servers virtualized... Jan 4, 2011 at 20:31
  • Product and service recommendations are off topic per the FAQ.
    – sysadmin1138
    Jan 15, 2012 at 3:53

2 Answers 2

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I answered your questions out of order as it made more sense for me to talk about the specific points in this order :)

Answer to question 2: In reality, 100mbps bandwidth at that price is unrealistic. The bandwidth on the FDC servers package is likely shared/oversubscribed. You should shop around and ask the providers who offer the bandwidth if it is dedicated or shared among a pool of users. Most providers at these prices are shared bandwidth. While there may be nothing wrong with this, it is something you should be aware of (since all the customers on this package, using all their bandwidth at the same time, is likely to cause a slowdown for everyone).

Answer to question 3: Your bandwidth usage for game servers seems a little high to me. Based on a worst case player usage of about 20kB/s (160 kilobits), 90 players would be about 14400 kilobits of outbound traffic per second. This translates to around 14 megabits of bandwidth. Check your math per player and don't get more bandwidth than you need! It would be much wiser to get quality bandwidth at 20mbit/s rather than shared bandwidth at 100mbit/s at the same price.

Answer to question 1: Get a server close to you and your target players. If you are in Denver, search for other colocation providers in Denver. Colocation and dedicated servers can vary greatly in pricing. Check providers which can build the server for you and compare costs. There are pros and cons of each type of hosting.

Answer to question 4: Ask for a IP address in the location that your server would be hosted so you can run a ping and traceroute to see latency. Generally speaking, ping under 50 is good for gaming. As an example, game ping times are about 100ms across the U.S.

Hope this information helps. Good luck!

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  • thanks for all the information! I will do more research to see if I can get a better bandwidth for around that price. So far, what I have seen, FDC is the cheapest one available. All other services I have seen either only offer 1Mb/s or 10Mb/s
    – Linuz
    Jan 4, 2011 at 17:39
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If you're running a server on the net you always have to worry about security, DDOS included.

The connections on those plans look unrestricted. You'll still be limited by the colo facility's own bandwidth (which shouldn't be a bottleneck for a proper facility).

Latency is going to be a much bigger issue for a game server than throughput. I don't know how much TF takes, but if it's like most, it's not much (like in the order of <100kbps per player).

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  • Ya I will worry about DDOS, I just don't want to have to worry about a successful DDOS attack costing me a fortune. How could I check the latency before I buy their service? And I heard of bad things about latency in Denver datacenters. Is there anything to that?
    – Linuz
    Jan 4, 2011 at 16:58

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