what exactly are they, friends keep asking me if I have room for it on a server but I have no idea how much bandwidth they actually draw or what their for actually. Anyone enlighten me? purdy puhlease? :D

You should run away quicky when they ask.

They use 50-200 GB per month in bandwidth (this is very general because it varies from game to game and the number of players).

Counter-strike has this nasty habit of using ALL of the CPU on map changes, and I would assume this to be the same for most games like it.

Game servers tend to be light on CPU usage (Except for Map changes), but love the ram.

And if its Battle field 1942 beat you friends with a Stick when they ask about it. BF 1942 uses alot of CPU, min is a 1Ghz I think. Add in the fact that the netcode is poor and your looking at selling your boat so you can pay for the bandwidth.

Lastly you need to be on a really good connection or gameplay will suffer. I myself wont play on a server with over an 80ms Ping.


If you look around you can find some pretty good game server rentals for around 100-140 a month. Its really the best option.
That is unless you just wanna rent a dedi to host only a Game.

That my 2 cents.

He is right. Game Servers eat lots of bandwidth. Gamers [the entire clan] will get very hostile when their game is down or if the ping times are high.

If you have spare bandwith then try yourself what are game servers?

Half-Life based games (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, etc) usually have the bandwidth limited to 6.5KB / second / connection. This would mean ~11GB/month for 20 players (I hope I did the calcs right!).

I'm not sure about Quake3 / Unreal Tournament games... they probably use a bit more than Half-Life, although the netcode is close to the same.

2Guns is very right about BF1942, the netcode is crap and you better have at least a 2GHz machine if you hope to run anything else on it.

Also note you should have at least a 1Mbit/1Mbit connection. Don't even try using cable or aDSL.

I would suggest your friends check out , arguably the best game servers aroundRecongamer (http://www.recongamer.com/)

Mike

Theoretically 11GB isn't right for full 24/7 but it's hard to figure out real usage.

good thing i didnt set this up, i asked how many people he goes about 30 or so I said thats not to bad, lemme find out the usage! :eek: i was suprised lol Thanks guys! appreciate it

Please note my estimate above wasn't based on calculations :) It was based on the fact that our 18 player server uses about 9-10GB / month, so I guestimated 20 players :)

You've gotta remember that your server will only be full to maybe 1 or 2am and will not get busy until after school hours.

Well, selling didicated game servers for ex: Counter-Strike is a good idea, it costs around the same as a didicated server but the installation of the server is pretty hard. Bad thing is you need around: 1 GIG RAM, minimum of 500MB space. 1GHZ **********(programs to install: Admin mod or clan mod, HLmod and statme)************

That is a complet game server

I wouldn't say it's too hard if you know what you are doing. I just setup a gameserver from OS installed to game launched (WITH adminmod, HLGuard, hlstats, and a couple of extra admin mod plugins) in about an hour or 2. No, no, the hard part is LEARNING how to set it up. If you aren't comfortable on the command line and the BASH shell in general, prepare for a long night of reading docs.