Your Server

Game Server - Datacenter.?

For all you game server admins out there! Im just wondering how many seperate servers you can run on one machine if The game was Call of Duty 4 and the power was AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 1GB Hyperx Ram 500GB HDD Im curious as to how these game hosting companies work. I know they send there servers off to datacenters but im just wondering how many *customers* they assign to one machine. Obviously this will depend on the game and the power of the computer. Im just curious :)

Public Comments

1. To run a Call of Duty 4 server efficiently, those specifications would barely cut it for a decent capacity (number of players) 'server'. Server companies usually run one of four (or all four) hosting configurations: shared, virtual, co-location and dedicated. Shared is exactly what it means: a hosting company would allow customers to have their own account and share resources with the other customers, being one processor one lot of RAM and a quota of disk space on a RAID array. It would be extremely rare for hosting companies to allow such high performance applications to run on such configurations. As a result of such flexibility for a host, this is naturally the 'cheapest' option for the consumer but with the least control. Virtual is much like a virtual operating system where one powerful server runs many 'child' operating systems where each child 'virtualises' a processor, RAM and hard-disk space as well as any other basic hardware. The host can control the virtual hardware so that every account is equal and that no account should intefere with another. Accounts usually have a fixed processor speed (and number of processors) as well as a fixed RAM amount but some companies do allow "burstable RAM" where you can temporarily get more RAM for higher performance applications. Generally, running gaming servers is frowned upon with virtualised servers because they are too "lower-spec'd" to handle that much information and calculations. Co-location and Dedicated are the same with respect to what hardware you get: it's your own box and you can do whatever the hell you want with it, and no one else gets their grubby mitts all over it. The difference with co-location is that you provide the server and the company provides the network backbone and datacentre to hook it up to. Generally, co-location is cheaper (because your not renting a server) but dedicated servers are much more flexible as the company owns them and will fix them if they decide to 'go on holiday', so-to-speak.