Are Virtual Private Servers’s appear too expensive compared to “real” hardware dedicated servers? For instance, may web hosts offer Virtuozzo VPS’s range from £30-40 per month price. This does not compare well with some of the dedicated server deals which seem to get cheaper everyday. Prices start for a “real” server at around £29 per month. So why rent a virtual private server when you can have a real server for much less?

Quite simply people are not comparing “like with like.” It’s assumed that the next best “step up” from a shared hosting account is a dedicated server. I don’t always agree with this and it can be a costly mistake, simply choosing the cheapest dedicated server deal.

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We recommend 1and1 for Cheap Game VPS Hosting. They are currently offering three month’s free VPS Hosting on the “Business” 1&1 Linux Virtual Server and 1&1 Virtual Server MS

Each 1&1 Virtual Server utilizes efficient Parallels Container Virtuozzo VPS Technology. You also get a the latest Plesk Control Panel licenced for 30 domains. 1&1 ’s VPS are hosted on 64-Bit machines:
We recommend the default OS of CentOS 5 + Plesk 8.3 rather than Fedora as it has a longer product lifecycle, though of course Debian Minimal is an option.

We would also suggest avoiding the “Home” VPS at £14.99 especially if you are wanting a game servers as you are only going to get sufficient resources to run the control panel and a few domains and require as much CPU allocation as possible. The “Business” 1&1 Virtual Server is a much more viable option. Choose the Windows virtual server if you are not used to operating Linux from the command line (though a lot of functions can be achieved through Plesk). With a Windows VPS you should get access to the remote desktop

Game Server Hosting

From simple text based worlds to full scale 3D “shoot ‘em up’s” online gaming over a network has progressed a long way. Joining in a game is fairly straightforward. Firstly you need a fast internet connection, preferably DSL. Then you need a copy of the game on your local computer and then a link to a dedicated games server.

Until fairly recently it was fairly expensive to run your own dedicated games server. Colocation or renting a dedicated Linux server on a fast connection in a world class datacentre would cost over £100 a month. As a result many game server admins have hosted their gameservers at home or sought sponsorship.

VPS or Virtual Private Server Technology with the ability to partition commodity Intel or AMD platforms into multiple virtual root environments, changes that. It’s possible to use a VPS for your gameserver, for not much more than the cost of a traditional business shared hosting account.

VPS providers also employ quite powerful machines as VPS “hardware nodes.” Typically they are dual 3.6 ghz Xeon’s. Though with SW-Soft porting their popular Virtuozzo VPS platform to 64 bit AMD platform, fast Dual Opteron’s hardware nodes are increasingly being deployed. RAM can vary typically ranging from 4 to 8 GB. To handle the hosting of many VPS environments fast SCSI drives with RAID configurations are deployed.

Plesk VPS Game Servers

One traditional problem with a Linux Game Server was that you need to be familiar with the root command shell to setup your game server. Many VPS’s come with the Plesk control panel which has a Counterstrike plugin. So for little more than £30 a month you can have your own game hosting server. Obviously you and your friends will need licenced copies of the games at home to participate in online gaming.

Using the command line
If you are comfortable with command line Linux, more options become available. You can install whatever games you want on your VPS, including the following with links to the relevant gaming files:

Half-Life
Counterstrike
Call of Duty
Opposing Force
Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
Day of Defeat
Plesk Counterstrike VPS - will require an upgrade to your Plesk key for Counterstrike module. This can be carried out by your provider or directly from Parallels.

Also you will need to find a VPS provider with the fastest network and ping times. Quite often a web host will be prepared to provide you with an IP address on their network for you to ping order to test latency. Many web hosts are also offering free trials or 30 day money back, giving you the opportunity to thoroughly test your virtual gaming environment.

Move Up to Virtual Private Server?

Traditional Shared Hosting: Most people are familiar with “shared” web hosting accounts. A shared hosting account is where you rent disc space on a server which is shared among many other users.

This is a cost effective way to getting started as a webmaster but it has some disadvantages. Firstly you may encounter email delivery problems if someone else with a site on the server decides to run a large business mailing. Also abuse of web hosting providers service may result in a torrent of spam clogging the shared mail queue, causing a “denial of service” attack.

You will find your website slowing down when someone else with a datebase intensive website (such as a forum or bulletin board). Another disadvantage of shared hosting is that you very rarely get administrator or root access. This can make setting up dynamic sites more tricky. Also you can’t install your own software and will have to put up with software libraries (such as Perl or PHP) that the web hosting provider has installed.

Security
There are also security issues to consider of using a shared file system. Could other users access your files and data with an appropriate script? This is of critical concern if you are considering ecommerce hosting and in particular storing credit card information. Certain credit card payment processors may wish you to have a more secure arrangement than a shared hosting server. A shared server introduces many more security vectors and someone elses unpatched phpBB script may result in lost business anddowntime for you.

Enter the Virtual Private Server
How can you avoid this problem? A few years ago you would have had to consider a dedicated server. However there has been a relatively recent development in web hosting - the virtual dedicated server. These are often known as VPS’s or Virtual Private Servers. A virtual dedicated server lets you run your sites as if you had your own “dedicated” server, except it is cheaper because you are really just using part of a server that has been split into multiple virtual dedicated servers.

The most important distinction to shared virtual hosting is that you have “root” or admin access and you control your own background processes, such as apache (httpd), qmail (smptd) and MySQL (databases) So someone elses buggy application or script is not going to crash or interfere with your own processes. Furthermore you have filesystem security as it effectively jailed or “chrooted” from other users and processes, and you can install your own libraries and software.

Where to Find a VPS Hosting

There are now plenty of VPS Providers. You can find many by searching Google for “virtual private servers” or “vps hosting” or looking in one of the many web hosting directories or forums. Virtuozzo by SW-Soft is the main commercial software that web hosts use to run virtual hosting services, but there are others. For instance vserver is similar in principle to Virtuozzo but is not as well used. Open source vps systems exist in the form of OpenVZ ( a subset of Virtuozzo) UML (User Mode Linux) and more recently Xen. It’s highly likely that you will be hosted on a Virtuozzo system.

VPS hosting used to be the prerogative of the smaller web hosts primarily looking for a more geeky market but recently the bigger mainstream web hosts have moved into VPS’s. Virtual Dedicated Server hosting starts at just £30 a month. You’ll get a much more generous bandwidth allowance compared to shared hosting, and none of the problems that go with a shared host. Usually you get multiple IP addresses that are exclusive to your sites, which you will need for SSL certificate hosting and for running your own nameservers if you want to register domain names.

So what’s the catch? Apart from the price there isn’t one. You’ll be spending a lot more on hosting each month but not as much a for a real dedicated server. The main drawback of upgrading to virtual dedicated hosting is that you will need to be more technically proficient so that you can administer the server. You might think this requires a lot Linux skills to make sure your server runs smoothly but most VPS hosts provide a control panel such as Plesk or CPanel to make administrative tasks a cinch.

Many hosting providers will offer “premium” or managed support which includes a bit more hand holding - this is definitely recommended if you don’t have much experience with Linux, and are not confident about keeping your VPS updated. It’s worth talking to your web host about updating and installing software. If its a Virtuozzo system, the web host will have pre-installed templates for common applications such as Coldfusion which can be rolled out across many VPS’s thus cutting down on disc space inside your VPS and well as saving memory and resources on the “hardware node” it runs on. Quite often the VPS provider can roll out operating system updates and bugfixes across all their VPS infrastructure.

With the increased speed and bandwidth that a virtual dedicated host offers, and none of the shared hosting headaches, the move is one you will never regret.