I'm in the process of redoing my Gentoo system so im going to start this quick.
I've been asked by people(mainly those I know off this board) on how to start a GSP(GameServer Provider) So i'm going to write the tutorial here. I am keeping this here and not in tutorials since this doesn't have to deal with SRCDS strictly. I will be compiling facts from my knowledge, users from this board, and from people who i know that have been running gameserver providers for years (before being a GSP was popular). I'll work on this tutorial over time so i will be editing this alot.
If you wanna start a GSP you need to ask yourself a few questions:
Why do I want to start a GSP?
What can I do to make my company unquie compared to all the others?
If you answered the first question with something along the lines of making money fast, you can forget it. For the other question making your company unique is up to you, do the reason on what others offer.
Starting a GSP is hard and time consuming, you would normally want to partner up and start a team because doing it yourself would be hard. Running a successful GSP requires the following but not limited to:
Knowing the game you provide
If you're going to be a GSP you have to know pretty much everything about the game you're going to be providing, for example, if you were to provide SRCDS servers you would have to be able to install, configure, and troubleshoot SRCDS.
You must know the operating system
Make your choice, UNIX, BSD, Linux, Windows. Whatever you choose, make sure you know it well. This means being able to install the OS, configure it, and troubleshoot (normally on a managed server, datacenter techs can troubleshoot issues, but normally charge for it).
Knowledge of basic hardware
This is pretty self explainitory CPU, NIC, memory, hard drives, etc
Networking
You should have SOME basic networking knowledge as well.
Money managment
A good GSP should have good managment, You need to pay the bills (hardware, bandwidth, etc) on time if you wanna prevent any unessassary outages, and you'll also know when you have to upgrade parts or get more servers.
If you wanna devise a team i recommend the following team layout.
You need at least 1-2 people who know the gameservers. You might wanna try to make sure they know pretty much everything about all the games you plan on providing or do separate subtems i.e. one team for srcds based servers, another for cod based servers. These people will be the ones who make sure games are running efficient as possible (least possible choke, lag, etc)
You'll want a technical support staff of at least 1:4 (for every 4 customers 1 tech) This will help reduce responce times on open tickets, fast responce times = happy customer. These people should have good people and communication skills. The more knowledge they have in the business, the better.
Then you'll want 2 people to call the shots, this includes, who gets hired for what position, what the website should look like, what servers to get, what datacenter to use, etc.
You might want a sales rep or 2 if people have any sales questions before they decide to buy your services as well.
Few extra items you might want is something to manage your clients, who's paying ontime, who is paying late, things like that. You also might want to look into a reliable game panel.
When you start your GSP you'll want to start off small, and I don't mean running the server from your home connection, because thats a BIG no no.I don't care how fast your connection is, its not reliable for a professional services, it may be ok for a couple of for fun servers here and there, but thats it. what I mean is start off with a dedicated server, either managed(server is monitored by datacenter staff) or non-managed(you monitor the server).
Once you're up to 2 or more servers, i suggest you start investing into racks. This can get pricey, but its cheaper than per server. With racks you're paying for space and bandwidth. This means you can say pay $200/mo for the rackspace (normally sold 1/4, 1/2 or full racks) plus the costs of bandwith, which is normally based on datatranfer permonth, or per megabit, this megabit is a dedicated megabit and usually costs more, sometimes around $20/megabit sometimes for 10 or more, once you get near 100megabit its normally cheaper)
Sounds expensive sure, but when you were say paying $150 per dedicated server and you switch to a half rack paying $200 rack rental and 10mbps dedicated bandwidth and have 5 servers, thats $400/mo vs $750 for 5 dedicated servers you were renting.
I'm going to stop here for now, but i'll pick this up and add comments from users. Pay no mind to formatting, when completed it'll change.
I've been asked by people(mainly those I know off this board) on how to start a GSP(GameServer Provider) So i'm going to write the tutorial here. I am keeping this here and not in tutorials since this doesn't have to deal with SRCDS strictly. I will be compiling facts from my knowledge, users from this board, and from people who i know that have been running gameserver providers for years (before being a GSP was popular). I'll work on this tutorial over time so i will be editing this alot.
If you wanna start a GSP you need to ask yourself a few questions:
Why do I want to start a GSP?
What can I do to make my company unquie compared to all the others?
If you answered the first question with something along the lines of making money fast, you can forget it. For the other question making your company unique is up to you, do the reason on what others offer.
Starting a GSP is hard and time consuming, you would normally want to partner up and start a team because doing it yourself would be hard. Running a successful GSP requires the following but not limited to:
Knowing the game you provide
If you're going to be a GSP you have to know pretty much everything about the game you're going to be providing, for example, if you were to provide SRCDS servers you would have to be able to install, configure, and troubleshoot SRCDS.
You must know the operating system
Make your choice, UNIX, BSD, Linux, Windows. Whatever you choose, make sure you know it well. This means being able to install the OS, configure it, and troubleshoot (normally on a managed server, datacenter techs can troubleshoot issues, but normally charge for it).
Knowledge of basic hardware
This is pretty self explainitory CPU, NIC, memory, hard drives, etc
Networking
You should have SOME basic networking knowledge as well.
Money managment
A good GSP should have good managment, You need to pay the bills (hardware, bandwidth, etc) on time if you wanna prevent any unessassary outages, and you'll also know when you have to upgrade parts or get more servers.
If you wanna devise a team i recommend the following team layout.
You need at least 1-2 people who know the gameservers. You might wanna try to make sure they know pretty much everything about all the games you plan on providing or do separate subtems i.e. one team for srcds based servers, another for cod based servers. These people will be the ones who make sure games are running efficient as possible (least possible choke, lag, etc)
You'll want a technical support staff of at least 1:4 (for every 4 customers 1 tech) This will help reduce responce times on open tickets, fast responce times = happy customer. These people should have good people and communication skills. The more knowledge they have in the business, the better.
Then you'll want 2 people to call the shots, this includes, who gets hired for what position, what the website should look like, what servers to get, what datacenter to use, etc.
You might want a sales rep or 2 if people have any sales questions before they decide to buy your services as well.
Few extra items you might want is something to manage your clients, who's paying ontime, who is paying late, things like that. You also might want to look into a reliable game panel.
When you start your GSP you'll want to start off small, and I don't mean running the server from your home connection, because thats a BIG no no.I don't care how fast your connection is, its not reliable for a professional services, it may be ok for a couple of for fun servers here and there, but thats it. what I mean is start off with a dedicated server, either managed(server is monitored by datacenter staff) or non-managed(you monitor the server).
Once you're up to 2 or more servers, i suggest you start investing into racks. This can get pricey, but its cheaper than per server. With racks you're paying for space and bandwidth. This means you can say pay $200/mo for the rackspace (normally sold 1/4, 1/2 or full racks) plus the costs of bandwith, which is normally based on datatranfer permonth, or per megabit, this megabit is a dedicated megabit and usually costs more, sometimes around $20/megabit sometimes for 10 or more, once you get near 100megabit its normally cheaper)
Sounds expensive sure, but when you were say paying $150 per dedicated server and you switch to a half rack paying $200 rack rental and 10mbps dedicated bandwidth and have 5 servers, thats $400/mo vs $750 for 5 dedicated servers you were renting.
I'm going to stop here for now, but i'll pick this up and add comments from users. Pay no mind to formatting, when completed it'll change.
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starting 9/24/2006 if your problem has been solved please edit your first post and add [solved] to the begining of the title. Thanks.
