Online gaming is at its peak with the growing interest of individuals, especially the youth, towards these online games. As these games get more advanced and high-functioning, such as the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), they require highly scalable and robust servers to ensure a high-quality, speed, and performance-driven gaming experience.
Moreover, many of these online and multi-player games rely on a client-user model or environment—where the user is required to both host and play the game.
Enter Dedicated Servers that have taken the gaming industry by storm. Dedicated Servers offer a robust architecture—to ensure faster gaming speed, high traffic management, outstanding performance, and advanced flexibility.
This article will take you through the need and some essential benefits of Dedicated Servers in the gaming world. Let’s begin!
What is a Dedicated Server?
Any server that’s used exclusively for a single purpose and all its resources are dedicated towards a single task is called a Dedicated Server. Dedicated Servers are used to power the most popular websites you’ve heard of. They’re also used to create IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS platforms.
As far as gaming is concerned, a Dedicated Server is used to bypass the game’s original server and use a more powerful, faster, and controllable server. And, with a web hosting provider, you don’t have to buy the server hardware. Instead, you just ‘rent’ the server. The company that’s hosting the server will take care of the server upkeep. You simply take care of the routine Dedicated Server maintenance, updates and optimisations.
If you opt for Managed Dedicated Servers, you don’t even have to take care of the routine server maintenance, upgrades and server upkeep. Everything is ‘managed’ for you by the hosting provider.
The need for Dedicated Servers for gaming
When a game is developed, developers often have a specific way of looking at things. The game servers have to be good enough for many people to game simultaneously. In essence, the idea is to carry the maximum number of people and deliver the best possible performance to all of them.
Developers often use what’s called a ‘peer to peer’ system to connect players to achieve this. Here, the person with the best internet connection carries the weight of all the ‘attached’ players. So, if someone at your house switches on Netflix, your connection speed will go down. So will everyone else’s.
The problem with the model is, of course, that there’s no stability. The results could be hilarious, except they’re quite frustrating, especially with MMORPGs. You’ll see matchups between players of completely different game efficiencies. You’ll see random lags and stutters in the game, and finally, you’ll see that there’s absolutely no guarantee about the stability of the frame rates at which you play.
Finally, there’s another problem — control or the lack thereof. Given that popular games usually host hundreds of thousands of people at a time, the concerns of an individual player are thrown onto the back burner. The result is that you cannot customise anything within the game. You simply don’t have access to do anything with the way that the game and the gaming experience is structured.
Dedicated Servers are a way out of this mess. They offer a unique set of solutions to the problems that gamers face, and it is these advantages that make Dedicated Servers increasingly popular with gamers.
Advantages of Dedicated Game Server Hosting
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Performance
This is the most obvious reason, of course. Having a Dedicated Server whose resources are entirely dedicated to power your gaming increases the performance significantly. The increase in performance will usually include greater loading speeds, lesser number and duration of lags, and better fps.
With a Dedicated Server, you can also control how many players are using the resources at any time to ensure that the server is never under undue stress. Gaming servers run by the gaming company are usually pretty bad at this. With your own Dedicated Server, you can massively improve how servers are regulated.
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Reliability
Game servers go out a lot. If you’ve been gaming for a while, this won’t come as a surprise to you.
With Dedicated Servers, you’ll find that the reliability of these servers is far greater than game servers. In fact, great hosting companies will actually give you a guaranteed uptime period with round the clock surveillance and monitoring.
Hosting companies are also usually better at creating and managing power, network, and hardware backups, given that they usually have huge data centres that power all sorts of servers across the globe.
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Control
For the more experienced gamers out there, this is a huge advantage. If you’re on a fast connection and some players aren’t, it not only ruins their experience, it ruins yours too. The game lags for everyone, bullets don’t hit targets, and the entire experience becomes spotty.
With Dedicated Servers, you decide who can use your server and who cannot. So, you can create simple speed based barriers. If a connection’s ping is greater than a certain number (100ms, for example), that device cannot use your server.
This enables you to ensure that only people with fast, reliable connections are getting on your server, and everyone’s going to have a smooth experience.
One other advantage of having this sort of control is using your server to solely game with your friends. You can create groups and teams consisting of your friends and gaming partners.
Essentially, a Dedicated Gaming Server allows you to create the rules of what can and cannot be done on your gaming server. If you’ve been a gamer for long, you know how valuable this can be.
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Near instantaneous support
Of course, there’s no concept of support with most gaming servers. If the game servers go down, players report it. If enough players report it, the people on the other side will look, and it gets fixed when it gets fixed.
With Dedicated Servers, you’ll find that support works differently. For starters, hosting companies are experts at server management and crashes rarely happen. Even if they do, Dedicated Server customers get the highest priority with customer support to ensure that they start functioning as quickly as possible.
Great customer support doesn’t end here, either. If you aren’t an expert with respect to servers and hosting, you may find yourself getting stuck at some point. Your customer service will include troubleshooting as well. With multiple channels of communication and assured deadlines, issues get resolved sooner than later.
Conclusion
Dedicated Servers are excellent if you’re a gamer looking to take control of your gaming experience. Their robust architecture offers enhanced customisation, control, reliability, flexibility, and security—ideal for a gaming environment.
So, if you wish to leverage these benefits and purchase a Dedicated Server to host your next game, ensure you check out our Dedicated Hosting plans at HostGator. We ensure maximum uptime, performance, security, and more at the best value for money. So, contact us and get your own gaming server today!
