When you are a hardcore gamer, there is nothing more frustrating in this world than being in the middle of a match and losing (when you know you shouldn't have!) all because of LAG!
Let's put it this way. You are in that pivotal moment and you're about to win and all the sudden your game freezes up and you lose connection. Frustration at its peak.
Gamers take their games very seriously, and rightfully so. Losing data and rank when the internet glitches or someone else affects your network can be truly rage inducing. This is why many gamers look towards getting a dedicated server.
Dedicated servers provide a reliable source of connection with high availability bandwidth solely for your gaming needs. Minimizing the risk of any interruptions, disruptions, Lag or worse.. connectivity problems. In the case of the casual gamer, the dedicated server can be used as a place to enjoy your games with your own friends or alone without interruption. It can also be used for others to join, and you can run a private server for a game. For larger enterprise gaming companies, dedicated servers can be a great alternative to scaling their infrastructure and controlling costs by having predictable bandwidth costs vs other providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and the likes, who typically base off a bandwidth usage model.
To help you on your journey of choosing the right dedicated server for you, we've compiled these ten reasons to consider dedicated servers for gaming and we hope this helps point you in the right direction for the best possible experience and outcome based on your needs.
#1. The Cheapest Option Might Not Be The Best
Everyone loves a great deal and you may feel a strong temptation to buy the least expensive option when it comes to dedicated servers. After all, a dedicated server is a dedicated server. This isn’t the best attitude to have, however, when it comes to buying a service. The bare-bones options may not include the necessary connectivity or customer service that you need, and saving a few dollars in the grand scheme of things might not be the best option. Always look at what you are getting for the price to make sure you have adequate bandwidth resources, port capacity, and CPU cores to avoid running into any pitfalls after you've done all the hard work of setting up and configuring your newly acquired game server.
#2. Memory and Bandwidth Matter
The more port access and bandwidth you have, the better the experience you and your players will have on the network. For example, if you get a dedicated server with 100Mbit/s of port access speed, but you are consistently pushing 90Mbit/s of traffic when you are playing. Chances are things are going to start to slow down and you'll start lagging. You can avoid this by making sure your pipe is big enough and you never go over 60% of your actual port capacity. Likewise, depending on how many players you intend to connect, you may want to make sure you have enough memory on the server from the get-go. Depending on the game, we recommend at least 64GB of memory, this will usually be enough to handle a significant amount of players and depending on the dedicated server, you should be able to upgrade later if need be.
#3. Support When You Need It
Chances are that most gamers have only a limited amount of knowledge when it comes to actually setting up and running a server. When you have a dedicated server hosted by a high-quality provider you can be sure that you will have support around the clock when you have questions and concerns. You may not always get this level of support when you choose a cloud option or trying to self host your game server yourself.
#4. Get a Dedicated Server Where Your Players Are
This is likely some of the best advice to pay attention to when purchasing a dedicated server for gaming. When choosing a dedicated server, try to envision where most of your players are going to come from. For Example, if you are in New York and most of your players are on the East Coast, it definitely wouldn't make sense to choose a dedicated server all the way in Amsterdam Netherlands would it? Your ping times would increase and performance would be slow. In a case like this, you would want to find a provider that was able to offer a dedicated server on the East Coast so your performance would be the best possible given your geographical location. Hence why, here at ServerHub we've put a lot of thought into each location that we provide, having 8 Global Data Center locations as of the time of writing was not an easy task, however we've been able to help our users grow their businesses, hobbies and alike by having the diversity to choose servers closest to them.
#5. Avoid Running Your Gaming Server From Home
Most Importantly, for our readers who are a hobbyist and not a professional gaming shop or game server host, if you decide a dedicated server is the way to go in terms of gaming, running a remote dedicated server is a far cry from building your own server and running out of your home. Not only will you have the hassles of trying to keep your server functional and doing what you want it to do, but you may also wind up dealing with headaches with bandwidth and space as some smaller servers aren’t equipped for serious gaming, which in turn will limit your performance.
