Hosting a Game Server

Online gaming is huge. Multiplayer components keep games alive long after players have exhausted the single-player aspects of a game. For example, look at Half-Life, released in late 1998. In computer years it's an ancient relic, but is still alive and well thanks to its rich multiplayer elements. The mod Counter-Strike, based on the Half-Life engine, is the most-played multiplayer game outside of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), referring to persistent world, online-only titles like Asheron's Call, Final Fantasy XI Online, Everquest, and Star Wars Galaxies.

Possibly the most popular multiplayer gaming genre is the first-person shooter. Games like Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 2003 (and the upcoming 2004), Tribes 2, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty attract hordes of gamers. Multiplayer gaming is so popular that like-minded players form clans and battle against other clans. As if that's not taking gaming seriously enough, there are even several professional gaming leagues such as the Cyberathlete Professional League.

Why would you want to host a game server? To get more control over your online gaming experience! Playing on someone else's online server is fun, but hosting your own server can be an even more rewarding experience. To find out more, we delved into the gaming community to find out why some popular gaming destinations host their own servers.

In this column, I cover what you need to host a good game server. This includes the right hardware, appropriate bandwidth, and a discussion of renting vs. owning the server. From conversations with gamers who host their own servers, you'll find out what makes a good games admin.

Why Host Your Own Server?

To find out why popular gaming destinations host their own servers, I asked the experts. Here are their replies. Duane Pemberton of Gamers Depot says, "I'm a gamer and I love finding ways to give back to the gaming community. Additionally, I've played in online competitions, and running my own server allows the team I'm a part of more flexibility."

Asked why the [H]ard|OCP chose to host its own game servers (at [H]ard|Gaming), Kevin Larkin says, "My best friend, Brian Holmes, and I were bored at work one day nearly three years ago, so what else was there to do? Play Counter-Strike! We'd been playing on several servers, but there was always something about each of them that we didn't like. We decided to start our own Counter-Strike server on one of the servers at work (oh the advantages of being the IT guys)."

Larkin likes the control that running his own servers affords. "We can run the servers our way with our rules with good admins. We at [H]ard|Gaming have very few rules, but the rules that we have, we enforce. We want to foster a fun atmosphere that gamers appreciate while keeping the peace, which isn't always an easy thing to do."

Control seems to be the rallying point of do-it-yourself hosting. GameSpy's John Burns likes access to do whatever he wants to a given server. "When you're renting a server and you want to change the game it's running or do any heave modifications, you're subject to the renting company's rules and the support staff being able to make the major changes."

Requirements for a Good Game Server

Game servers dedicated for public consumption often need to be powerful machines. The goal is to provide a positive gaming experience for gamers who choose to play on your servers, and the mechanics should be transparent to them. That means the server has to run the game without a hitch.

As for what kind of hardware you really need, according to Larkin, it depends on the game. "For instance, HLDS, the server that runs all the many mods of Half-Life and Half-Life itself, is extremely CPU intensive. Whereas, BattleField 1942, Unreal Tournament, or even Call of Duty, don't require anywhere near the same hardware requirements, player for player, as do the Half-Life mods."

Pemberton takes a scattergun approach: "We're using a single Pentium 4 3-GHz CPU running in hyperthreading mode and a gigabyte of RAM. That configuration seems to be able to handle any game we've hosted to date."

But you need not re-mortgage your house to afford a machine that will serve up hot games. Elimin8r of TeamArea51 gets away with inexpensive hardware for his Quake 3 Arena servers. "I don't work for a hardware company, so my servers are bought or donated. I host a [Quake 3 Arena capture the flag] server with a 24 max total player limit on a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of Corsair [memory]."

Besides the hardware itself, you've got to contend with bandwidth. "Your server ping is the number one selling point of a good server," said Larkin. "You simply cannot achieve low latency and low ping using DSL or cable, nor can you (for the most part) get the needed upload bandwidth that a game server needs. Dedicated bandwidth is a must."

Ping is used to measure latency. Ping is the amount of time it takes for a packet of information to leave a network appliance such as a PC, bounce off another networking device, and arrive back at its originator. The lower the ping from a game client to a server, the better the online playing experience is.

Thus, consumer Internet connections like cable and DSL might not be sufficient for a popular server. "To run some of our servers I use a wireless T1 line that gives me more upload than DSL and cable," said Chad Case, of the Indoorsmen gaming clan. "I have two of these lines in my home and they get used a lot. Running off DSL or cable means fewer people can join, as DSL is capped at an upload rate and cable fluctuates too much to hold an actual ladder (a match to see who's the superior gamer) or league or match on."

Rent vs. Own a Server

If dragging in dedicated lines, building supercomputers, and maintaining your own equipment seems daunting, consider renting server space. A number of companies allow you to set up game servers on their equipment, using their bandwidth. All you do is pay a recurring fee.

Dallas "Deadheart" Behling of Art of War Central, plugged the renting option into a Star Wars analogy: "Given a choice between an Imperial shuttle do-it-your-self kit or renting a berth on a super-star-destroyer," he says, "I would take the latter, for reasons too numerous to list in full. But they include such things as: it's already there, it's got better technology than I can get a hold of, it's faster, it's got bigger guns, it's got a fleet of shuttles inside it."

Most hosting companies have nearly unlimited bandwidth. Jerrod of ServerXtream brings up some important points: "We're not limited to the maximum bandwidth provided by a personal ISP that is connected to your home. We have more bandwidth available than we would ever need. If you host a game server out of your house, you'll not only see very bad performance due to the lack of bandwidth, but your connection will be saturated by about eight connecting players."

"On top of this," he adds, "most ISP do not allow any kind of server running on a customer's private home connection. Basically if you run a server out of your home, you're most likely going against your ISP policies, but ISPs don't seem to monitor this as much due to the [number of] servers running in customers' homes."

The downside of renting is a lack of control. Renters are limited to the games and mods the server company hosts. Although the server hosting companies each host a lot of games (GameVault, for instance, hosts 13 titles, Art of War Central hosts more than twenty, and ServerXtreme hosts more than a dozen and promises that it also hosts mods of popular games), you can't host just any game on a whim like you could with your own server.

In favor of do-it-yourself server hosting, James Anderson of CoD-Center says, "You do whatever you please with your own game server. Have as many players as you want (some companies have preset limits), modify the settings as needed. You have full control on how it operates."

What Makes a Good Admin?

Besides wrangling bandwidth, supporting hardware, paying hosting dues, and choosing which games, mods, and maps to host, you have to be a good administrator. The reason games exist is for people to have fun. If your server doesn't provide an atmosphere that promotes enjoyment, people won't play on it.

To gauge the level of enjoyment players are experiencing on your server, it's a good idea to play on it yourself. Talk to the other players, ask them what they'd like to see on your server, take suggestions for maps and mods to host, and just be a part of the community that forms on your server.

Note: If you choose to run a server rather than to rent one, you should always run a dedicated server on one machine and play on the server with a different PC. Dedicated servers don't have to crunch data associated with actually playing on the machine, so they perform better for the players who connect to them.

Unfortunately, there will always be bad sports: people who seek to offend other players, profane players, people who initiate personal attacks on other players, people who deliberately kill members of their own team (called teamkilling, abbreviated as TK), people who use programs like aimbots (scripts that aid in aiming at other players) to cheat, or people who exploit vulnerabilities in the game software itself to see through walls or become invincible.

The best way to deal with unsavory players is to be diligent. Warn abusers not to be disruptive, and if they continue to play in an unsavory fashion, kick them off of your server. All game servers provide administrators with ways to boot players and even ban them based on their IP addresses.

"One word. OK, two words. Good Admins!" says Larkin when asked how he deals with unsavory players. "If you don't have good admins, you won't have a good server. What do I mean by good? Admins who know the game they're in charge of, know how to deal with people of all ages and all kinds (they come out of the wood work, I'm telling ya) and know how to communicate and work together with other admins."

Pemberton is more concise: "We always warn, kick, and then ban." Burns also advocates banning. "We have a strict policy against cheating: If you're caught cheating, you're banned for life," he says. "We take great care when banning someone as we don't want to ban a person just because they are really good. As for profanity, we don't have a very strict rule against it, as trying to prevent it would just drive people away from our servers."

Some games have anti-cheat software available for them. GameVault, for instance, offers HLGuard, a server-side program for Half-Life and its mods that looks for cheats like aimbots and other hacks. ServerXtreme and Art of War Central leave it up to you to deal with cheaters, but both allow you to install anti-cheat programs if you want.

A more extreme way to ensure a fun server is to password protect it and only allow players whom you invite to join. Alternately, if the game allows it, you can hide your server from server lists, requiring players to manually punch in your server's IP address to join. Hiding or password protecting your server is a must when you host clan matches or ladder tournaments, to prevent players not involved with your competitions from wandering in.

With a little effort and a lot of care, you can host a fulfilling game server for any game you choose. Playing the game you want with the maps and mods you choose is immensely satisfying?especially when a community of regular gamers starts to blossom on your server. Whether you do it yourself or rent is up to you. Always remember, you're in it to have fun!

Joel Durham, Jr. is the co-author of Build Your Own High-Performance Gamer's Mod PC (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2003). He's worked as a technical editor for PC Gamer magazine and CNET's Gamecenter.com. Joel is the author of hundreds of articles about videogames and technology.