Speak to any gamer and they are always looking for excellent game server providers. But what defines the quality? Well a wide range of things like price, support, ping and network and server hardware.
The price
The cost is all relative to everything else when looking. If you choose to pay peanuts expect to get that back in quality. But this does not mean that some cheap hosts are not good reputable companies but there is a large majority that are not. At the same time just because you pay more don’t expect the service and quality to be higher most of the times it will be but do you need it to be.
Support
We never like things to break but they do. But when it does go pop we need to know people are able to help Getting your support should be a secure and easy process when you want it. Should it turn out to be hardware then middle men are a nightmare. Most companies rent there servers from another company that have resold them from someone else who has sold the rack space who has then rented the racks from the datacenter. This is an easy case but can involve up to 7 companies or more! Renting from companies who rent directly from the datacentre is always easier and quicker. Support hours are critical for gamers they don't want business hours. Yes 9 -5 is great for business not for gamers, they want afternoons evenings and weekends. As otherwise you are sat waiting for the next working day to get your issue looked at and possibly fixed for assistance with your CSS hosting.
Server Hardware
Single core processers may well of done the job fine five years ago not now, now you want duel cores minimum and really quad with 4gb of RAM to get a stable server as otherwise lag will plague your game. This is not to say that the companies load their COD4 servers relative to what they can take. But a budget provider will over sell so at 2 in the afternoon might be fine but come peak gaming will be unplayable. Do some home work and ask the host for a test server or test ip but find out the IP range they have and look it up on game monitor and choose some servers your self to test.
Network
Gamers always want no lag but this will be almost impossible to do but getting a low ping is best. Game servers hosts will quote you the port speed of the server like 100mbit or 1gbit this is not that important. The upstream connection from there core switch or router to the upstream providers network is most important. As the server might be able communicate with the other servers they host quickly but if they only have a 10mbit connection to the internet it may be a little slow.
Reviews
Read testimonials left for a company on there forums but also search the internet for them these can paint a different picture. But many companies are open about the testimonials and will leave bad ones for people to read on there forums to prove they are only human.
