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BF2 Server Requirements

J

john600rr

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 8, 2007
Messages
165
Well I do work for a company which is looking to get into hosting game servers. What they are really looking into is being a player for when BF3 servers are needed. They claim to have some inside info, but wouldn't tell me what that meant. :rolleyes:

So, they asked me to look into quoting some servers and getting some ideas for locations, configs, bandwidth, etc. So I decided to look into current BF2 requirements and everything seems fine. Hardware is too easy, I'm not sure of the amount of servers they'd want to run but from their past investments it's small to medium.

But I got to bandwidth requirements and it dropped my jaw. Take a look at these numbers and someone please tell me I am an idiot:

64 person BF2 servers requires 8 megabits upload and less download. Okay. With 80kb/sec per client times 64 = around 5 megabits upstream on the server side. So I suppose 8 megabits is safe.

So lets say 1 single Xeon server could host 4, 64 person servers, that would be 256 clients at 80kb/sec = almost 21 megabits per second.

Now while doing some research I found that other companies are renting servers for $2.00 a slot. So $128 a month for a 64 man server. How in gods name do they make money?

Considering a DS3 line runs anywhere from $3000-5000 a month and it could only handle maybe, 550 clients.

550 x $2 = $1100 a month income.
Bandwidth price would be $3000+.

I know I am out of my league on this one so somebody set me straight.

John
 
Most of the companies renting out these servers aren't the same ones paying the big bandwidth bill. They may rent dedicated servers from another company or do colocation. The bigger game hosting companies may not actually do colocation or rent, but then they are also likely part of another company and still aren't the only division paying for the connectivity.
 
They make money by renting out "virtual servers"...1x physical box hosts quite a few "virtual servers". Tis why they usually don't perform as well. Better..and MUCH more expensive, to have your own dedicated server.

The horsepower for a game server itself isn't all that important, I've built and run quite a few public game servers (even going back to the Unreal Tournament days...built a server that made the NGStats top 20 list for well over a year..made it to #16 in the world). On that box we ran 4x separate game servers..and the box still had plenty of leftover horsepower. In the Battlefield and Battlefield Vietnam days...I had a dual 1.0 GHz box I built running 3x separate BF games at 48 and 64 players. When that server was full...I was pegging 16 megs of bandwidth at peak usage.

What counts is leaning out the OS well (stripping and disabling services, you can get 2K3 server to run on well under 70 megs), fast SCSI drives with the pagefile on a separate spindle, low impact antivirus with proper exclusions, having clean dedicated bandwidth, a "server grade network card", and hosting the box on quality bandwidth (upload is important)..if it's behind a router..a good business grade one.
 
When I was running 125 to 140 players consistently in BF2, I was eating up 2,700GB of bandwidth a month.

The server had a XEON 3050 which is an awesome CPU, it would run right at 60% with that load.

The OS was Windows Server 2003. 2GB of RAM.

BTW, EA tightened up the server selling with 2142 over BF2. No longer can people just resell servers with ranked 2142 like they could with ranked BF2. Also, part of the deal is that you as a GSP provide free servers for people to play on.

I would guess that the only ones doing ranked BF3 servers will be the real GSP's like MyIS, Hypernia, etc. All these "dudes" with a control panel will be locked out.
 
Thanks for the responses guys. I am mainly concerned about the bandwidth costs. For the actual server hardware, I've got several servers I could get running to run BF2 right now but I will probably hold off the find out about BF3 requirements.

I've looked into colocation and it looks like you could defer some of the bandwidth costs but I'm not sure. Anyone else have any ideas how those companies actually make money renting servers?
 
I think they make money by overselling their bandwidth. Most customers will never come close to using all thier alloted bandwidth.

Go and look at a listing of BF2 servers, 80% of them are empty.

Click this link: http://www.game-monitor.com/search.php?game=bf2&pg=32

Out of 144 pages of 30 servers, you only have to goto page 32 before you see servers with only 2 people idle on the server. So, in a way, all those empty servers pay the bill for the full servers.
 
Met-AL said:
I think they make money by overselling their bandwidth. Most customers will never come close to using all thier alloted bandwidth.
Click to expand...

Yup...oversubscribing bandwidth, and pure numbers of shared servers. Similar to how ISPs model their sales..oversubscribing.
 
Thanks guys. I think you guys are right.

Overselling + server colocation is probably the only way they can make money. I wonder though, if BF3 is extremely popular and server renters find their servers full, will server rental prices go up? Or just lag down completely? :D

This of course, is assuming that EA goes a similar route with Ranked servers as it did with BF2.

Thanks for the responses.
 
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