Game server question

[Matt897]

I run an Enemy Territory game server @ home. Its on a 50 down and 8 up connection.


The connection seems to be fine for the most part for most players, however people on the other end of the country (Oregon, & Cali) have much larger pings and experience lag. These same players play on a server not too far away from me - hosted in a datacenter, and seem to have much lower pings obviously.

I don't have a lot of money to host professionally, and I wanted to know if anyone out there had any success with hosting their games on a virtual private server. Most game hosting companies want $23-$46 depending on the amount of slots, but I figure it I rent a shared machine from Dreamhost for $8.95 a month, I can host as many people as I like within reason (I'm not looking to host more than 24-28 people)


Thank you

 

[German Muscle]

Hosting on a VPS will actually worsen the issue your trying to fix.

 

[Matt897]

Is that because it isn't intended for speed? High latency?

 

[German Muscle]

Hosting a gameserver on a VM induces to much scheduling and switching delay.

And straight from my sig.

The larger problems with VM's is that clock ticks are emulated downstream from the upstream host. context switches etc become more apparent.

 

[rivacom]

Hosting a gameserver on a VM induces to much scheduling and switching delay.

And straight from my sig.

Not that I'm a expert by any means. But I'd like to know a little more of why and how? I've googled Game servers on VPS and it seems that many of the big name Providers actually use VPS nodes to split up their Dedicated Servers.

Also from the search, I found a few people who talk about the same thing(VPS not for gameservers) however these seemed to be all Windows based machines.

Also, are you talking straight VM? What about the other technologies? OpenVZ, Xen(Similar to VM), etc? There are some technologies where you get dedicated Resourcses assigned to your node.

So really I see this argument going both ways. I think it all depends on your VPS. But i'd really like to see any articles related to what your saying. I deal with VMWare at work and in most cases, I can get the machine to run better as a VM then I could when it was a physical machine.

 

[German Muscle]

Not that I'm a expert by any means. But I'd like to know a little more of why and how? I've googled Game servers on VPS and it seems that many of the big name Providers actually use VPS nodes to split up their Dedicated Servers.

Also from the search, I found a few people who talk about the same thing(VPS not for gameservers) however these seemed to be all Windows based machines.

Also, are you talking straight VM? What about the other technologies? OpenVZ, Xen(Similar to VM), etc? There are some technologies where you get dedicated Resourcses assigned to your node.

So really I see this argument going both ways. I think it all depends on your VPS. But i'd really like to see any articles related to what your saying. I deal with VMWare at work and in most cases, I can get the machine to run better as a VM then I could when it was a physical machine.

I highly doubt there are any articles regarding the effects of using a VPS/VMs for Gameserver hosting. Some companies do use VPS for hosting servers but they are usually extremely modified to reduce the latency.

 

[rivacom]

Was just curious. The only thing I've ever run into is Kernel Latency, which I've seen many tests done(A low latency kernel vs General) and the results were not going to be anything noticeable.

 

[German Muscle]

Was just curious. The only thing I've ever run into is Kernel Latency, which I've seen many tests done(A low latency kernel vs General) and the results were not going to be anything noticeable.

That in general or for Game servers?