We actually get this question very often, mainly by those not in the USA who want to know why and how their pings to our servers are so much lower than those in their country.

It has nothing to do with our location and everything to do with the location of our servers and not necessarily their geographic location either.  Many game server providers are private individuals that have a stock of servers on their home network.  All home network providers are TEIR FOUR providers, this means that there are FOUR network interchanges before they hit the backbone of the internet.

Our servers are TEIR ONE — from the data center’s LAN, they are already on TOP of the public peer exchange in Florida.  When you can trim out 40% of the hops, that means you can host a server from farther away with less ping.

Our servers are also truly dedicated; they are not shared with 100 other customers; only our guild utilizes these servers for our game servers and we manage them meaning if a game misbehaves, we either fix it or ditch it.

We’ve tried them all, even BlackBox and were unsatisfied.  In every case, these providers offered a relatively small “portion” of a server even though we would rent a server with high slots.

For instance, with Space Engineers we rented a server for 40 people when the server hit 10 people, it became unplayable.  When I moved the server to our private DS, we could host 50 without issue and had 43 on and no server lag.

The problem is, these providers stuff as many customers on one machine as they can in order to turn a profit.  I’ve asked several of them before to “Charge us extra if necessary for more resources”; they would always refuse.  It is more profitable for them to stuff 100 customers on a server paying $39/mo than to kick all but 4 for $100/mo.

So the problem is overstuffing the servers for the 99/99/99 rule, which is: “99% of the time 99% of the customers will be 99% idle”; therefor their logic dictates they can have 100 customers per core. While this is true with business application hosting, this is not true for gamers.  We have found that 70% of our servers are active 100% of the time with “peek” hours at 7pm EST.

So these poor providers trying to host our games was more like someone from the Special Olympics trying to compete with Payton Manning.

Our Linux servers are hosted by the Goldsboro Networks co-opted data center in Florida.

Our windows servers are generally hosted locally on one of our member’s LAN’s either in New York, Georgia, Alaska, or North Carolina.

A “DS” or “Dedicated Server” is the name given to the “hardware” of a server to designate that it is only for one customer or client.

Many game companies and game server providers misuse this word, almost fraudulently to make their customers believe that they are renting a server just for themselves.  These are called “Private Servers”, which are server instances hosted on a shared platform with other customers.

Noap!  A DS means “Dedicated Server”.  At best, a game server provider offers a “Private Game Server” because they host other customers on the same box.  Our servers are truly “Dedicated” because only our guild has access to the server, and we have ROOT ACCESS.  In another words, we have to make our own control panels 🙂

No.  You rented that DS in NY (likely because your guild plays in NY) for ~$30/mo.   True to their word, your game provider placed you on a TIER FOUR network in New York.  Will you get better ping on our servers? Most likely: Yes.  But we also pay over $1,500/mo for just one of our servers.

So did you get ripped off? No. You got exactly what you paid for.

Because of all of the bugs, no one plays it much. It also occupies a LOT of CPU time and RAM while idle, so until they fix the game and netcode we have simply turned it off.  It is still on the server and we still have the world save file, we’re just not simply doing anything with it until it is fixed

You can’t.  Because we have a non-profit (free) TeamSpeak license, we are unable to openly or privately accept donations of any kind.  However when one of our bills becomes due, you can volunteer to pay for it. If you would like to donate a TS3 Commercial License so we can accept donations again, please feel free to contact Chip about that.

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