Has anyone hosted game servers on a VPS? What did you use?

How did it turn out?

How many slots of what game were you running?

I have tested Xen and KVM extensively for game servers. KVM is terrible, but Xen performs very well, when using the latest version and properly tweaked (using stubdoms and GPLPV Windows drivers, if applicable).

You can do it and it works -I've run a large cluster of several different types of game servers in a cluster of VMs on my grid to collect metric information with live players and as I suspected, with the right configuration and a predictable environment everything works fine without lag.

However, if you are asking can you host or run a game server on a run-of-the-mill VPS environment the answer is yes with the following caveat:

Unpredictable performance due to resource availability Since each VPS is sharing a slice of the CPU time depending on the load of that server and make no mistake a box hosting different kinds of users will have varying stress points be it cpu, memory or I/O these fluctuations in performance/use are likely to cause sporadic in game ping spikes etc. which is why most people recommend against it.

Number of slots 64 to several 100s across the cluster.

Hope this helps.

Did anyone try running VPS in Xen vs Virtuozzo 4 enviornment with Steam client games, and what performance is like? 64bit containers that is.

Thanks

I used to run a XEN based VPS service prior to 2006 and I have a lot of metric information regarding system performance on that platform. As for steam based game server performance I have metric information for that in VMWare, VirtualBox and Bare-metal configurations.

Thanks for your replies everyone. It's interesting to see what others have to say about things like this.

Did anyone try running VPS in Xen vs Virtuozzo 4 enviornment with Steam client games, and what performance is like? 64bit containers that is.
When optimized with GPLPV drivers, dedicated cores, and stubdoms, and using the latest release, Xen has worked extremely well for every game I have tried, including HL1-based games, Source-based games, CoD*, Crysis, BF2, ArmA2, and others. Performance is very close to bare-hardware.

It depends on the VPS host, if they offer fair share CPU (the most important component for gameservers).
VPSes will always have a performance drop cause of their overhead but with light solutions such as openVZ you barely notice it.
If you own the hostnode you should make sure all the limits of the VPSes are high enough to allow the resources gameservers use.

For most cases i would recommend a vps as an entry level thing. But you can host a decent amount of Source (Valve) servers on a simple linux vps. you can also run most of the servers for the Call of Duty series and even Battlefield 2. (these are servers i have installed and run at one point or another.) i personally have been with linode.com although im moving to a windows vps linode has been an excellent host for running game servers. You should rent a vps with at LEAST 512 ram.

I suggest talking to John at NFOServers as he sure knows a thing or two in regards to game servers on a vps.

This would depend heavily on the provider. For example, I know we have clients who run TF2 servers off our nodes, but they definitely have more than a $9 plan.

You need to make sure you get enough CPU and RAM, not to mention disk I/O levels on the node.

I've ran UT3 and TF2 servers from a Linode.com XEN VPS using their cheapest plan, and they ran suprisingly well. I didn't test long term, but for the evening I was experiment; they ran well.

I ran a call of duty 4, and two half life 2 dm servers at once and they ran fine in xen also on linode's cheapest plan.

That's interesting you say that. Linode seems to do really well from everyone I talk to. I bet they hate it when people get on there and run game servers. The CPU use is far far far beyond what they would expect from a regular customer.

From some of the Linode customer service posts I've seen on their forum, they really don't care what your use your VPS for as long as it's legal.

You CAN run a game server off a vps but make sure its a decent vps - not a budget one. Check the system requirements for the game server and see if your vps has that PLUS some.

It's possible to run gameservers on a VPS, but don't use a cheap VPS on a overselled server.
If you have a VPS with at least one dedicated core, it won't be a problem.