Online gamers have been flocking online en masse to play with friends, online players, and online gaming teams. Some gamers go on to compete in LAN tournaments and online gaming leagues for money and prizes. One common type of online game genre is called First Person Shooter (FPS). Almost all FPS games include client/server software and typically support 2 to 128 players simultaneously. The game server software is the arena or the world in which the players enter together.

The game company sells the game client and they give their game server software away for free. It's really a brilliant idea - instead of the game company having to bear the heavy expense of machines, bandwidth, and labor to run the servers, they launch the game with, maybe, only a few dozen servers and turn the bulk of the server responsibility over to the players. The company then just manages the metaservers (directory servers for matching players with available game servers). This strategy works out quite well. Look at Counter-Strike, a Half Life mod from Valve, in which one ranking site estimates that the game gets over 9 million unique online players a month using approximately 20,000 player-run game servers. In this situation, this model saves the game company around $1 million in hardware every two years, around 3,500 Mbps of sustained player bandwidth, and thousands upon thousands of hours of labor per month, which would be impossible to do in such a grand scale with only a small team of hired staff (including technical support for server problems).

Hosting a game server over the Internet can be accomplished on any player's home computer if he or she has a broadband connection. In fact, these servers can be run on the same machine being used to run the game client, though this generally causes lag after about six players join the game on this server. Lag happens when your game starts abruptly skipping, freezing, or acting sluggish. There are many different causes of lag and its cousins: muddy play, where game play slows down as if you're trying to move through the mud; choke, where the game ends up moving on while ignoring your actions, because your responses aren't reaching the server or are traveling too slowly; poor bullet registration, that is, bullets resulting from shots don't travel or hit correctly; drops, when the game freezes and then you fall off the server, due to heavy lag or a lost connection; and so on. Most lag problems can be attributed to the player's or server's hardware, network, machine configuration, Internet congestion, or bugs in the game.

To deliver professional-grade game server performance without the headaches of setting it up and maintaining it personally, game server hosting companies were born. Game hosts provide game servers running off of fat pipes, typically with 100 Mbps capacity, and server-grade machines that the end user doesn't have to maintain.

Game servers are commonly rented out on a monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual basis with prices based on the number of maximum concurrent players the server can support, and whether the server is made public (anyone can join) or private (locked with passwords, just for your own group's fun and practice). The more players who use the game server simultaneously, the more bandwidth and processor time gets used, hence higher costs for large, public servers.

Often, Game Server Hosting Makes No Money

It's true. It's relatively easy to set up a few basic Windows game servers, so countless players turn into entrepreneurs every month. It's fun to do at first but realistically nobody makes any money because the overhead for hardware, bandwidth, and labor exceeds the money made.

Let's face it, gamers don't want to spend a lot for a game server. Years ago, no one wanted to pay to rent a game server at all, but now many gamers have grown to accept it. Now that they pay, they demand a low ping (fast end-to-end connection speeds), no lag server with good customer service, and a low price. If you price too high, you'll get only a few customers and not enough to propel your business. However, if you price too low, you'll be flooded with customers but you won't have money left to hire a real support team nor to expand, not to mention constant complaints of lag or worse while at the same time not having enough to pay your next month's bandwidth bill. If you meet in the middle, you make enough to pay the bills and maybe cover some labor, but you won't make much of a profit. It seems that only the oldest veteran game hosts are pushing closer toward a viable business model after sinking six figures into their businesses.

Linux Cuts Costs Through Labor Automation

While Windows game servers are very easy to set up with the GUI interface (hence the large number of game hosts starting up each month), Linux is the operating system of choice for earning a profit. It's not just that Linux is free. More important, the operating system's power and rich scripting environment includes access to countless invaluable built-in Linux tools. We're able to reduce hundreds of hours of labor through automation and, in turn, work toward a viable business model.

At GriffinRUN.com, we have racks of machines spread over five locations around the U.S. with custom-built Bourne shell, Perl, and TCL scripts along with well-defined hierarchy and relationships between the machines where a set of masters control various local servers, overseeing particular functions on those computers. This system, which has been developed and enhanced regularly since our launch in March 2001, is named GIGAS for Global Internet Gaming Administration System. Thanks to GIGAS, new game server installations take as little as two minutes, and global server patch upgrades over the five locations take as little as 12 minutes. GIGAS also monitors and recommends proper load-balancing placement for new server installs; provides full automation for security monitoring; detects server attacks since both disgruntled players and fly-by-night competitors are known to try to DOS attack machines (denial of service) and this can ruin customers' play among other things; handles black listing and global banning (set simultaneously on all game servers by monitoring servers in the control hierarchy when hacking attempts and other attacks are detected and traced by the security tools); automatically tunes customer servers for improved performance; and handles countless other tasks. We constantly find ways to hand more tasks to GIGAS, with the happy result of reducing labor and extensively growing our customer base.

This automation of repetitive labor is vital to game server hosts who want to grow from hobbyists to viable businesses. Without developing toward full automation, most who start up will do as many have done before: fail mere months later.

Conclusion

I've personally worked with both Windows and Linux platforms over the last eight years, and have many colleagues with expertise in both skill sets. However, I've found that the power within Linux makes it easy for us to develop automation for all parts of the business logic except for live human support. Even then, we're using tools to help in that area as well. In fact, Linux game server software is so important to us and many like us, that, to date, we have a policy whereby we won't support a game company's game unless they provide a Linux-dedicated server binary. This is simply because our Linux automation makes it possible for us to support thousands of game servers without prohibitive labor costs.

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