FPS game server hosting questions

Connection speed, type and what ports are being blocked.

I dont know the connection speed, but I know its hella fast. Its where we host our companys website. Its on the 'internet backbone'.

I dont know the connection type either. Is this the same thing as the speed? Anyway, whatever it is, its fast.

Ports being blocked? Well I think pretty much everything except whatever is required for pcanywhere and email or whatever. Oh wait, do you mean blocked by our machines, or blocked by the company we rent the hosting space from?

I hope your company isn't paying much for that hosting; 2GB is abysmal for monthly bandwidth. I get more than that from my cable co, and they can hardly tell their ass from a WAN. I think I get like 64GB per week on the very cheapest Dreamhost plan.

In any event, bandwidth loads will be dependent on game load, obviously. You should try running a few test games to see how much.

You cant even give me a ballpark figure on the bandwidth?
I seriously have no idea wether it will be 10 megs of bandwidth or 100 gigs of bandwidth per month.

Im not even going to ask the boss about it if its over say 1 gig per month.

So obviously I cant run tests since Im far from being set up. After all, this thread is about how to get set up.

Disclaimer: I'm talking about CS:S servers here, since I don't play DoD.

You're looking at an average of 10 to 15KBytes/s of traffic per player. It depends on the players' net settings; this is a rough estimate. It also depends what you set the server's tick rate to (ranges from 33 to 100. 33 is evil. 100 uses more bandwidth and server CPU time. 66 or 75 is a good compromise).

Going off 10 players (your average clan war) for one hour on a decent server, I'd imagine 300 to 500MB of traffic. This is a wild guess but probably not too far off. When the server updates itself via Steam this will consume bandwidth too. If you're running custom maps, that too will use bandwidth.

Are you sure it's 2GB of bandwidth, and not 2TB? [wink]

I think Counter-Strike used around 5KiBy/sec per player for each direction. The source varients likely use much more (for physics etc, if multiplayer has the same physics), so a scientific wild guess would be around 100KiB/sec per player, or approx 187MiBy/min for 32 players. Using that figure, 2GB/mo could support ~0.81 players.

Of course, unless you're running a dedicated server (and I'd hope for 2GB/mo you're not), it does't matter, because webhosts generally don't let you run arbitrary programs on their machines (and with 2GB/mo, you likely have an overpriced shared hosting account that definitely wouldn't let you use the CPU resources required for a big-budget multiplayer game).

2 GB per month ? That's awfully low. That's even lower than what most personal connections get. I'm hoping it's a typo and you meant 2 TB ( 2000 GB ) per month ( which is more in line with the offers i've seen ).

Anyway, for my estimation of bandwidth, i'd say 10 KB/sec/player with an average of 10 players (at peak times, a server could run 20-30 players, but's that's usually not the average) at any time, would need a monthly bandwidth of ~250 GB per month.

Y.

Crap Ill have to double check on that 2 GB bandwidth limit because no one seems to believe it. But I know as a small company we *definetly* dont have much traffic at all, and Im sure 2 GB would cover it, if it is even possible to purchase that little.

Also, were not renting someone's server machines. They are our own machines, and we have complete control over them. In fact I went down there last week to stick another gig of ram into our database server, and did a windows update on the webserver.
All were renting is a rack to put our servers in, and the fat internet pipe to hook it up to.

Quote:

Original post by Extrarius I think Counter-Strike used around 5KiBy/sec per player for each direction. The source varients likely use much more (for physics etc, if multiplayer has the same physics), so a scientific wild guess would be around 100KiB/sec per player, or approx 187MiBy/min for 32 players. Using that figure, 2GB/mo could support ~0.81 players.

I think there's a small error in your calculation. 2 GB/mo -> 66 MB/day -> 2.7 MB/hour -> 45 KB/min -> 0.75 KB/sec (which is matching your ~0.81). But of course, that's the bandwidth allowed per player and per second. If your game needs 5 KB/sec/player, that's 0.75/5 = 0.15 players

Y.

Ok "Dedicated Server" just means a server that you are not playing locally on, right?
It doesnt necessarily mean that its up and running 100% of the time.
Maybe I could just fire it up on weekends and a few hours on weekdays when Im going to be playing on it?

Quote:

Original post by AndreTheGiant Ok "Dedicated Server" just means a server that you are not playing locally on, right? It doesnt necessarily mean that its up and running 100% of the time. Maybe I could just fire it up on weekends and a few hours on weekdays when Im going to be playing on it?

You could, but there wouldn't be much point because it's not likely to get any traffic (people don't generally join near-empty servers when there are plenty of near-full ones). Of course, if you're just playing clan matches or the like, that would be a fine way to run it (though you should make sure your server has low ping to you - high bandwidth and fast web response time doesn't mean low latency [see satellite connections])