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I was reading some of the posts, you don't realize how much money you need to have this started. I talked to the owner of Funservers.com, and they started it with 50K 8 years ago so....plus you have to to be pretty advanced in IT. And the bandwith you purchase ain't cheap, and it's several thousand dollars a month for it. Not to flame, but you might want to become a reseller, just my two cents, but I do run a sucessful business and I actually looked at this and did a whole balance sheet and biz plan.
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I don't see why you'd need 50K to start a GSP. To start, you really only need 1 decent server colocated. After you get more clients, you can buy more servers.
Bandwidth is only "several thousand dollars a month" when you are buying a massive amount of bandwidth or in some off-the-wall location. You should be able to get bandwidth between $40 and $100 per Mbps depending on where your servers are and who you're getting bandwidth from.
Lets say you build a server for $1,500 and you need 2 Mbps of bandwidth to start. That's $1,500 up front and ~$140 per month for the bandwidth. Add in the rackspace rental fee (we're charged $30/month) and you're putting out about $170 per month.
If you charge $3.50 per slot for srcds servers, you only need to sell 48 slots to break even on the montly fees. If you have a decent server and can find clients, you should have no problem getting to that point. Anything above 48 slots helps pay off your original $1,500 investment.
If you want to jump in with both feet and buy 10 servers and 10 Mbps, go ahead, but I don't think it's a great idea or plan when starting a GSP.
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03-22-2006, 11:33 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-22-2006, 11:34 AM by candy-man.)
$1.50/slot is a very cheap price. I have not seen any reputable LA providers (the market I'm targeting) that charge that little.
Originally we were selling at $2/slot, but raised it because certain people were hesitant to go with any company that offers prices that low. They figure we are overloading our servers. $64/month is not enough to cover the bandwidth and hardware requirements needed to run a 32 person pub.
It's very difficult to sell quality servers at $1.50/slot. I can think of three different scenarios which would make it possible:
1) You have already paid off your servers. You no longer need to bring in large amounts to offset your original investment.
2) You are renting servers/bandwidth in such bulk that the price you're paying montly is almost nothing. You are able to pass this on to your clients.
3) You don't care about making money. You just want to break even and that's it.
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Really, its not that expensive to start a gsp if you have enough to go big. meaning building your own servers, and just rented a whole cabinet from a datacenter. That is enough room to hold quite a few servers, if you keep then 1U rack servers. That costs some money to start, but if you have good servers, then before too long it will pay for itself. Although idealy if you did want to start small, you could just co-locate 1 unit of rackspace, or even a quarter cabinet.
You could also start off really cheap by rented a dedicatd box from another company, and just rent servers off of it lol, but its hard to garuntee stability then.
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04-17-2006, 01:29 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-17-2006, 01:31 AM by cryotek.)
I pretty much run things for systeminplace gameservers(until we open machgaming at the end of april) and we pretty much charge 1.75 for public 1.6/cz and $2 for source. and we have very happy customers. and we did pretty much what skeletor said awhile back, started with dual xeons on a few racks 2u each for better airflow of course, now we're rolling with some opteron 252s. Bandwidth is in chicago provided by equinox. 25mbps at the moment, dedicated, soon to be upped to 50mbps.
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Ud need more than 2mbps for 48 slots i would have thought since my server was running >3mbps at 32 slot 66tick
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Normal tick...
48 slots
Players around a ping of 30
11.520mbps
proly should have 15
