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.

We are making some pretty exciting changes to our network not only in Los Angeles but globally this month. But we wanted to highlight some exciting news taking place this month. We are excited to be joining the Any2 peering exchange in Los Angeles this month. Any2 is home to many exciting companies such as Apple Inc., NetFlix, Inc., Yahoo! Inc., China Telecom, CloudFlare, Inc., and CoreSite just to name a very few out of the over 100+ peers that are currently on the West Coast Exchange.

“ServerHub's decision to peer with Any2 in Los Angeles is going to yield benefits not only for the clients within our Los Angeles facility but our users around the globe,” states Rohip Sidiqi, “by peering with Any2, our network will be faster and more stable, improving latency and fault tolerance.”

We expect to have the exchange peer up and running by Mid-May, once lit our users on the West Coast will enjoy ~1ms connectivity to some of the largest companies and peers on the exchange.

The Internet has been around now for quite some time. In a nutshell, the internet is a group of autonomous and separate networks. Each of these networks operates with IP addresses and leverages BGP which is a Border Gateway Protocol. Through this system, any user on the internet is then able to connect with any other user even if they are not on the same network. However, to gain access to the greater network a user must either pay to connect through the traditional transit links or peer with other networks operating within the global framework. This brings us to the concept of network peering and why it is a vital part of our online platform.

Network Peering Explained

Through network peering one internet network can join to another directly without the need to access common carriers such as Telia, Level3, GTT and the likes. This enables a more rapid throughput and efficient information exchange between the two networks. As well as this, there are no added on charges and no issue with linking to a third party network.

In contrast, a transit connection does require either the network operator or the user to pay for a cross-connect and carry the network traffic on their behalf. This is one of the greatest disadvantages of the more traditional approach.

To use IP peering, you need to make sure that an agreement is formed with other networks and that the connection can be set up between the two. There are a variety of ways peering can work. Through IP peering, there is an exchange of data between two ISPs and usually, the amount exchanged will be close to equal. Since the agreement is mutually beneficial there’s no need to worry about changes or payments with this type of agreement, with the exception of cross-connects in such instances where the meeting point is an exchange for example. At ServerHub we've begun to invest heavily in IP peering. Why is this?

The Unseen Benefits of IP Peering

IP Peering provides a lot of benefits that you simply can not gain through the more typical option and we want to deliver the absolute best service possible to people who use our service. We believe that IP peering is the right step forward here.

One of the greatest benefits of IP peering is that it provides a higher level of control. The key factor to remember here is that through peering traffic remains at a local level. This is in direct contrast with a transit connection where instead data can travel through any path across the internet. This means it might not be the fastest or indeed the most efficient route and it can lead to a great variety of problems.

There could be latency or even packet loss and if this happens, then you, the client, will be left vulnerable to downtime of the transit provider. On the other hand, since we utilize peering, the route can quickly be adjusted. So, if there are individual segments experiencing problems with slowdown issues then these can be avoided completely. You get faster service and you won’t need to worry about any server issues.

We have direct peering relationships with Large CDN and enterprises such as StackPath CDN (High Winds), Verizon EdgeCast, Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, CloudFlare. At ServerHub we can thus give you the edge and make sure that connection times to these companies and many more are lightning fast. How fast? Well, using our peer network, connection times can be kept under 1ms.

The reason that these connections can be so fast is due to the local set up between two peered networks. Furthermore, problems with saturation and congestion can also be avoided.

Congestion along the destination and source for networks can lower the experience for network users leading to what is ultimately a poor quality connection. With direct connections between networks, we can provide a guarantee of enough bandwidth for the best, most consistent performance.

This type of setup is beneficial if there are problems with disasters or any other outages that might impact data. Business owners are always worried about the issue of a disaster and how long it will take to complete a full recovery. With peering, we can make sure that there is a massive level of support from various different resources if this becomes an issue. So, a full disaster recovery plan can be put into action immediately and downtime can be minimized.

Our peer network also ensures that we can handle higher levels of traffic. If your business is experiencing higher volumes of traffic or is expanding rapidly, you don’t want to run into any problems with performance. With our peering solution, even the highest amounts of traffic are distributed across a variety of different networks.

One of the biggest issues with transit links is the high level of dependence on more than one transit providers. With peer lending, this high rate of dependence can be greatly reduced. With IP peering we can strive for the most resilient and redundant network connectivity map as possible. This helps ensure that the network that our clients use is more reliable and is a greater transit service.

IP peering also provides a great level of cost savings when exploring ways to route traffic between individual networks. In one example an IP might be exchanging high levels of customer traffic with a second source. Sending traffic through a transit provider to another network is inefficient and expensive. Peering is a far more effective alternative where traffic can be handled at a shared facility and transit costs can be completely eliminated.

Beyond this IP peering will also improve the network ranking. It’s crucial that you can show that your network is providing a better service and reaching a higher tier than others online. This will improve the perception of your network online and ensure you have a competitive edge. Using our peering solution, we can help you guarantee that this is exactly what happens.

We hope this provides some insight as to why we have invested in IP peering over traditional transit links. We aim to provide the best, fastest and most reliable service to our users while continuing to reduce costs and achieve greater efficiency levels. Due to the benefits available, we believe IP Peering is the way forward on the ServerHub Platform and will continue to develop peering relationships.