Dedicated home server

[HazardO]

Surely for someone who intends to be playing games at the same time, not necessarily on the home server I imagine, running one 100 tick 10 man CSS server is going to be already too much for a 50mb virgin line?

The upload on a 50mb line is no different from their other packages.

The uplink on the 50Mb package is 1.6Mbps, that's more than their other services.
(And it needs to be, a typical TCP session has ~40:1 data to ACK ratio, so if your uplink was only 1Mbps, you would struggle to get 50Mbps downstream.)

Edit: According to Virgin, the upstream for 50M is 1.5M, 20M is 768KB, and 10M is 512KB.

 

[MotherMayI]

Ah, cheers - Its still not enough for 4 game servers thuogh

I remember reading that the upload packaged with it, 1.6 as you say, still isnt really enough to support the 50mb down as well. Not that Ive ever hit 50mb, so I wouldnt know

 

[Rroff]

If your using a home connection as well as serving from it its going to be very laggy for the players connected.

Also depending on the game and player load in each server instance your looking at 5-13KB/s outgoing per player - taking overhead into account and not flooding the entire connection which would lag everything out your looking at around 16 players hosted on a 1Mbit upload before the experience starts to degrade.

As a rough idea when I was hosting L4D1 versus servers - I had 3 running on my dedicated box (gig-e connectivity) - and when full the average bandwidth in use was 1.5Mbit/s with 24 players. You could probably host that on a good 1Mbit upload without the connected players noticing much if any lag due to the efficency of clientside prediction but it would be edging it.

 

[Viper²]

Also depending on the game and player load in each server instance your looking at 5-13KB/s outgoing per player

It's more like 6K/s if you have your server set up right.

 

[FrenchTart]

It's more like 6K/s if you have your server set up right.

As Rroff said, it depends on the game and player load...

 

[Rroff]

Depends a lot... 12 player CS 1.6 server you prolly have ~2.5KB/s outgoing and 800byte/s incoming on the server per player.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - 20 player server you'd have around 18KB/s outgoing to each player and 3-8KB/s incoming depending on their cl_maxpackets and framerate. (clients with 125 maxpackets will send input commands at a higher rate than those with lower settings). Which at peak is almost 3Mbit/s outgoing - you could drop sv_maxrate to say 10K and it would be smooth most of the time but in the bigger battles clients would see increased levels of prediction leading to less accurate representation of whats actually happening eventually leading to jerky gameplay if it gets too bad.

 

[craptakular]

why dont u throw your spare parts into a case and go co-lo at say killercreation?

 

[AbsenceJam]

why dont u throw your spare parts into a case and go co-lo at say killercreation?

What a sensible suggestion. Instead of experimenting with running servers at home with a spare machine the OP should definitely buy a rackmount case and pay a couple hundred a month instead. The two are so close.

 

[seldNofSparta]

will be too laggy. unless you want to play cs at 400ms latency, dont bother .

 

[uv]

What a sensible suggestion. Instead of experimenting with running servers at home with a spare machine the OP should definitely buy a rackmount case and pay a couple hundred a month instead

Co-lo prices are nowhere near that ridiculous. The only issue for the OP would be the initial costs of a 1U case/mobo/PSU.

You're looking at ~£40 pcm for a decent co-lo - not a "couple hundred"

 

[Rroff]

Your not gonna get the spare hardware he has into a 1U or 2U case tho realistically... tho if he could as you say decent colo starts around £33 a month for 3TB bandwidth, 100Mbit ports and good power.

A midi sized case colocated anywhere decent would set you back atleast £100 a month probably more.

 

[peetee]

Id sell that spare rig and hire a server, a home virgin connection is gunna be rubbish for most things.

Im on a 10/10 at the mo and half tempted to set up a 1.6 server due to most of them around being utter crap.

 

[Deaco]

I did some testing and faffing about on my connection 10m down 512 up.. it worked fine for a 4 player L4D server any more and it would fall over. But for those 4 peeps they had fine pings 40-60, so it might doable but realistically it'll be probably one 8-12 man server tops, any more and I think the connection will be stretched.

Should be fine for testing and have a play around with dedicated servers, but I don't think realistically you'll setup anything remotely close to what you wou were thinking, maybe in Scandanavia and places like that with their super connections, but not in this country.