Hosting A Game Server? Know Your Needs

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multiple gamers in one house - boosting internet speed

With three teenage boys and an overgrown teenager for a spouse, I have a serious need for insanely fast Internet in our home. At a minimum, we have four gaming consoles running any time they are all home. Four online gamers sucks up the Internet like you would never believe. I have upgraded all of the routers and modems in the house to the highest speed possible, but the provider wasn't providing us with a fast enough connection to keep up with everything. I found out about a few more things you can do to improve the speed of your connection for situation such as mine. Find out what here on my blog.

Hosting A Game Server? Know Your Needs

30 August 2016
 Categories: , Blog


Minecraft and other multiplayer games were just the beginning. With many online survival games such as Ark and online games such as Ultima Online offering built-in private server options, more people are ready to create their own personal server to act as hosts for friends or even to become a semi-professional service. If you're tired of being part of someone else's ruleset or simply want a place for your group to create without the interruption of unchecked strangers, here's some data center insight to get the resources you need.

Memory And Processor For World Support

Any game's private server is simply a program that handles the events of the world in the background. The server doesn't run a graphical, colorful, fully-animated version of the game in the same way that players experience the game. Instead, scripts run in the background for every non-player character movement while handling requests and responses from the players.

This is still resource intensive, as the entire world and actions from players must be calculated. Because of this, you'll need more than the minimum amount of memory and processor power to run a game that is enjoyable and as free of lag or server-related delays as possible. 

Every polished, professionally-released game should have a set of requirements. In most cases, there will be minimum and recommended requirements, and you should always go for the recommended amount or higher. The minimum amount should only be for experimentation, and any events of asking for more resources or failures with your system may slow everything down on a regular basis.

The amount of memory increases based on the number of players in the game, since it creates another player that all of the relevant server information must report to. These reports have become more efficient, but every game is different. In some games, the world outside of where the players exist is either paused or non-existent, while other games want the entire world to be working and even interacting with itself even if the players aren't around.

What About Internet?

The internet capacity for your game needs to be able to handle requests from players across the internet and must send information to those players at the same time. The internet required depends on the size of the game's information packets, which is different for every game.

If you plan on playing a game with modification files or mods that change the original (vanilla) gameplay to something customized, it may be a good idea to run a website on the server as well that can serve the files or at least automatically deliver those files to players so that they don't have to go through the technical work of getting setup.

Despite playing these internally complex games, some players can still be technophobes to the point of being afraid of extracting files into a specific folder. Offering this service is helpful but means that your server will need more internet capacity or bandwidth.

Games will also have internet bandwidth as a requirement, and you should always give your server some extra bandwidth for overhead. There's no officially settled number, and the recommended (not minimum) requirements often include overhead in their calculations, but consider giving 1mbps (megabits per second) more than what you need in case of excessive requests.

Look through community forums or even developer social media posts and documents if there's no information on requirements, or leave the search up to a data center professional to get the server setup and running smoothly for you to use as you need. For more information, check out a company liek Cologix.