Renting a Server
Rasputin
Join Date: 2009-06-16 Member: 67854Members
Join Date: 2009-06-16 Member: 67854Members
<div class="IPBDescription">What's the best company?</div>I have absolutely no experience running a public server, but recently me and some friends have gotten back into NS (mainly due to excitement for NS2). We want to go in on renting our own server because we're tired of the crap that's mostly out there right now (bots, bad plugins and max. 32 players). I've done some googling for a good company to rent from and don't really know who to trust. Obviously price is a factor, but the most important thing is choosing a reputable company that many people have had good experiences renting from. We also all live in Seattle. Any suggestions?
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Disclaimer: I work for them.
Great people, great support, great servers. :)
Disclaimer: I work for them.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I've used these guys and was quite happy.
For the last six months we have been using a dedicated server provided by The Planet and we couldn't be happier. The crashing issues are a thing of the past and it sort of proved, to us anyway, that our problems at Gameservers were most likely hardware related.
I will agree that Gameservers will give you the most bang for the buck (value) and even though we were all frustrated I have to admit they did a good job of responding to our trouble tickets with some sort of response within 24 hours. You may have more luck with stability if you limit the server to 16 - 20 slots.
NS requires a LOT of cpu power (and bandwidth, but that's less of a concern) compared to other HL1 games (and even most newer games), so if you see a company selling NS slots for the same price as CS1.6, you should probably question the quality and/or their competence with regards to them running your server.
That being said, there are a LOT of buggy plugins out there. My server is pretty stable (compared to other NS servers) because I've gone through and either wrote from scratch or rewrote most of the plugins I'm running. According to my logs, my server has crashed 14 times so far in June, but some of those are false because when I'm testing some things I terminate the server from the console, which gets detected as a crash sometimes.
I'd be interested to know the crash rate of BAD's servers now that they're running on their own hardware vs their previous provider. I'm sure it's much better, but I don't know how much better.
If you're looking for a Chicago based server you might want to pm me.
For the last six months we have been using a dedicated server provided by The Planet and we couldn't be happier. The crashing issues are a thing of the past and it sort of proved, to us anyway, that our problems at Gameservers were most likely hardware related.
I will agree that Gameservers will give you the most bang for the buck (value) and even though we were all frustrated I have to admit they did a good job of responding to our trouble tickets with some sort of response within 24 hours. You may have more luck with stability if you limit the server to 16 - 20 slots.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I can tell you that 99% of any crashing issue we see are related to plugins. There are reasons we are so insistent on making sure the plugins are disabled as the very first step when dealing with any crash issue. It's pretty simple to disable them, it takes editing one file in HL1 games, and will tell you if the issue is with the plugins. It's very, very unlikely that it was a hardware issue. While I can't say for sure right now, if it were a hardware issue, there would be more then one server having issues on the same machine.
With stock servers, I'd say that's the case.. but people love to add all sorts of plugins/mods to their CS/other servers that drive up the cpu/bandwidth usage by a lot..
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->That being said, there are a LOT of buggy plugins out there. My server is pretty stable (compared to other NS servers) because I've gone through and either wrote from scratch or rewrote most of the plugins I'm running. According to my logs, my server has crashed 14 times so far in June, but some of those are false because when I'm testing some things I terminate the server from the console, which gets detected as a crash sometimes.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is very true. AMXX by itself is essentially perfectly stable.. It's been around long enough that any crash issues in it have been long since fixed. When you start throwing in plugins that alter gameplay... it's a whole different story. Sadly, most people are unwilling to believe this.. It's always a "hardware problem", or "something you changed" to them.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I'd be interested to know the crash rate of BAD's servers now that they're running on their own hardware vs their previous provider. I'm sure it's much better, but I don't know how much better.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Having been playing there a lot over the past few weeks, I can tell you it still crashes fairly frequently, or boots people for illegible server messages.
EDIT: I'm well aware they have crashing problems due to plugins, my point here is that they were also having non-plugin problems, which as far as I can tell had to have been hardware/underlying OS related meaning their GSP's problem and their GSP was unwilling to acknowledge this and kept blaming it fully on them without really investigating the actual cause.