Equipment needed for hosting online games
 

I wanted to ask you guys about what equipment is needed to host multiplayer games, like Counter Strike, or America’s Army. I’m talking about large scale hosting. Just how many games would a standard home computer be able to host at a time? How about a server? Mind you, these machines would be set up specifically for that purpose.

Totally going to depend on the game. Some games use a lot more system resources than others.

I think you are going to be limited by your bandwidth first though.

You might also try asking in the games forum, some guys in there might know more.

This is what EA suggests for Battlefield Vietnam. I would imagine that this is more than what most other game servers demand.

Quake and Unreal/Unreal Tournament dedicated servers are pretty light in terms of system stress, because they're very small command-line apps that run. Battlefield dedicated servers put a lot more stress on a system.

What games do you want to run and how many players do you expect to have? Do you plan on having bots on the servers or not? A lot of things depend on what you're trying to do.

I can confirm this: more than 10 players on a hosted server will require better than DSL connection. I'd say at least Cable Internet for 10 players. 16 is pushing it before you have a T1 connection going directly to your house. The above info is based on Battlefield 1942...I'm not sure about other online games. I can also say that my shitbox 400 MHz K6-2 with 256 MB of RAM hosted a 32-player BF1942 botmatch with ease. The Internet connection is where you're really gonna suffer with online player games, though.

-Lasereth

Like others have said, it really depends on the game. Counter-Strike has very low requirements since when Half-Life first came out the fastest processors were only around 700 mhz.

Aside from the hardware your major hurdle is getting enough bandwidth. The solution: find someone in a college dorm network. At the UW dorms the bandwidth per room is amazing (both upload and download) so I know a couple of people who host game servers and my ping to them is usually between 16-30 :D .

Computer speed is only half hosting a server. You also need a massivly fast line (T1+), and if you're planning on keeping it set up all the time, then you need a completely seperate computer for it.

I was thinking about commercial game servers. People want to buy 16 or 32 slot servers to play with their friends or clans. Bandwith is not a problem, I was thinking more along the lines if a single server could host multiple games at a time. It seems like a whole lot of an investment to dedicate a 1.8 Ghz computer solely for hosting a single map. Is that how it works? As far as games as concerned, I was thinking about the most popular FPS titles, like CS, BF:V, AA, UT and so on. I'm sure HomeLan does something similar.

EDIT: edited to make more sense.

I'll give you an example for cs.

A good friend of mine lives in a condo that has an uncapped fibre line (also note that he's one of only 30 residence in this condo). Speed is around 9/9mbit. Location is in toronto, and I get around 70 ping to his connect.

The first CS server he put up was a 1.83GHz AMD-XP w/ 512 ddr (2100 I think), and a crappy onboard video card (doesnt matter much).

When playin in the server, with over 15 people connected, the server would spike to around 110 (for me), and i'd almost constantly get 30-70 choke, and 20-40 loss.

Recently our company (tfl) was sponsored 2 xeon server's, both 2MB Cache, 3.2GHz with 1024 DDR 3200 (not specified brand/timings), and onboard video.. running redhat. (Note these are sponsored from intel, and have to go back after our tournament that ends today).

With both of these running a server each, 32 slots each. When one is full I get 80 ping, no loss, no choke. When both are full, ping goes up to 95(ish), no loss or choke.

So, both the connection and the computer matter alot. Even with the decent computer before, we were getting major spike's, and alot of loss/choke... but with the best xeon server that intel could sponsor us, everything ran nearly flawless.

For commercial game servers, you'll need a lot more than a T1 line (1.544Mbit transfer speeds). You'll need to shell out for a T3 or an OC line of some kind - or ideally pay lots of cash to have your machines stored at a data center with high-bandwidth lines.

However, in order for the machines to be stored at a data center, they (normally) have to be rack-mountable. This means that your average home-built computer is not acceptable. You'll have to purchase high-end servers from companies (HP, Intel, Dell) and use those.

Things to look for: Lots of cache (ie: 2MB cache that the Xeons mentioned above have), Lots of RAM (1GB or more - nothing less acceptable), fast processors (Xeons should be the way to go, you don't want to touch 64-bit CPUs for this).

However, the downside is that it's going to be prohibitively expensive unless you've got a very large budget.

My company is working with a server and bandwidth provider, so bandwidth at least isn't an issue. I'm trying to get an estimate on just how profitable this might be. I see that HomeLan is charging around 60 bucks a month, but considering how much servers cost, I can't imagine how this would bring in any income :/.

The key is long-term sustainability.

If you buy 10 servers, each costing $3,000 (total cost of $30,000) and plan to use them for 24 months, you would make $14,400. That's not enough to pay for the servers, so if you keep them for 36 months, you make $21,600. You'd have to keep them for over 4 years to turn a profit.

However, if you lease the servers from companies (i.e.: HP) and possibly arrange a promotional deal where you post numerous advertisements for their company, you should be able to arrange even lower lease prices. This will allow you to turn a profit much faster.

Thanks all, this is exactly what I had in mind. Well, I'm off to do some research :-).