Running a game server from PC vs renting one, differences?

Perfect_Chaos · 21 Nov 2015 at 12:35

I have some questions about running a game server. Now in L4D2 I am pretty sure I tried hosting a local server once before and players pings would usually shoot up when a lot of action was going on, anyone know what that is all about? This was a while back but even then my upload speed was around 5-6mbps. So this shouldn't be the issue? Now it's 12mbps.

Is there a difference between connections running on a rented server vs running one from home for gaming? I looked around and managed to find this site http://www.gtsgaming.com/cart.php?gid=1&currency=2 which seemed a bit suspiciously cheap to me, but they look genuine from what I can tell. Anyone know if I would be better off renting one from there?

DaleTheWhale · 21 Nov 2015 at 13:57

They're are plenty hosts around and what they do well at is being dedicated to hosting the game with a strong internet connection to give very fast upload and download speeds (into the hundreds, as they're dedicated business lines). However, with hosting yourself especially on your own network is your internet speeds won't be as strong/consistent against a dedicated line (sharing with the neighbourhood cable box) and the hardware may not be as strong as a server build (Xeons, ECC memory and lots of it!).

I pay for a minecraft host, costs £4 a month for 4GB memory and SSD's. So aim for a price lower than that as Minecraft comes at a premium and L4D2 doesn't need that much power.

I hosted a server on here using a persons virtual box (never took off) but 1GB-2GB and a decent network will suffice.

FrenchTart · 21 Nov 2015 at 13:59

L4D2 is surprisingly tough on CPU usage actually. Obviously MC is a real killer though

If you've got a decent server PC to host on at home then 12mbit is more than enough upload for a dedicated server. For your particular situation all you save by going the hosted route is the hassle involved in setup.

Twirlywoos · 21 Nov 2015 at 14:11

Depends on game I would have thought. Before TWI pulled the plug on large ranked servers, I ran a 64 man server on Killing Floor 2 on my local machine. I asked everyone in game if it was laggy and I only had 2 people complaining but they were probably American anyway.

I only ran it for ***** and giggles and never intended to have my machine running as a dedicated server but it was only on whilst I was gaming. I had 16gb RAM at the time and ran HT on the 3770K and dedicated some threads just to run the server.

I'm on Bt Infinity 75/15

BlizzardX · 21 Nov 2015 at 19:15

Also, you need to consider power. One of my single Westmere-EP based Xeons with 32GB DDR3 RDIMMS consumes around 80w at idle (not quite as its running about 5 VMs idling for the most point); so that's 80w an hour, 57.6Kw per month at 24/7 running... In NZ, that equates to $11 per month at $0.2NZD per KW.. Change the 0.2 to what it costs you for power and you might find that renting a server is actually more cost effective, especially if you'll be running the server at full speed more often.