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A week ago, I was approached by a good friend, Dazz, to help him in the venture of starting a game server provider. I figured what better thread to create on UA than the stuff we go through to start up this venture. I dare say there will be quite a few people looking for information on what to expect.
Finding a server
For us, finding a server was easy. Dazz already runs quite a nice premium Australian based Web Hosting company, so his redundant DNS server was doing pretty much nothing. Sporting a dual core xeon processor, 4GB of RAM and 100Mb/s internet link, it was perfect for a few servers to test viability of it. It is situated in a fantastic data center with a great SLA, so it couldn't be more suited for a few premium game servers.
Choosing our offered services
We decided that since we were starting small, we'd start with TF2 and CS:S. TF2 was already on the server, and CS:S is still rather popular in Australia. We will expand to CoD4 very soon, as again, it is still a popular clan game.
We're on the fence about offering TeamSpeak/Ventrillo. We need to keep our server loads as low as possible at the moment, but at the same time it's another feature clans would be willing to fork out money for.
Choosing a panel
We tossed up the idea quite a bit of both running with a premade panel or making our own.
Making our own panel would require a bit of work and motivation. I have some of the skills required, so would need to expand and learn a reasonable amount, and Dazz was in the same boat, but too busy. It was a possibility for in the future, but not one we would consider now.
Grabbing a premade panel was the other option, which we have chosen to do. We spent quite a bit of time searching for panels. We found a good panel, but then realised it was Windows only. Screw that. The server is running Linux. Eventually we settled on SwiftPanel. It's free for this (US) Summer, and has a new major version being released very soon. It still requires manual set up by administrators, but the new version is supposed to feature automated setup, billing, WHMCS integration etc. Perfect! The beta is released in a tad over a day, so I do look forward to fiddling with that.
(Coldsun, I'm still up for checking out your panel if you've found the install scripts for it =D )
Pricing
Pricing is something we've been tossing around quite a bit. Do we charge a more than competitors, and hope word of mouth filters around about how good our premium quality servers are? Do we equal the competition and hope again that word of mouth filters around? One thing is for sure, we weren't going to undercut competitors and give a sub-par service.
We have ended up deciding on slightly above most competitors. We hope our premium service will be enough to convince people to buy our stuff.
Advertising
We're investigating a few ways of advertising at the moment. We are currently sponsoring two CS:S clans in return for them advertising us. After all, word of mouth will be one of the most valuable (and cheapest) ways of advertising our awesome servers.
We are also going to sponsor a large local LAN with a few months free server rental, to be given away as a prize for either the CoD4 or CSS competition. The competitions for both games attract quite a few teams (Last event had at least 10 CS:S teams), and 450 players for the entire event (plus spectators, organisers, etc)
We also have a few pub servers set up with our name splattered all over it. I can't see these working too well as a form of advertising, but I'll let myself be convinced if we see people coming in from them.
Still yet to do
We've still got to get a website up. The LAN we will probably be sponsoring is this weekend coming, so we don't have much time. But as we are going to be associated with the web hosting company, we are planning to duplicate the site, change a few colours around, change the header images, etc. Shouldn't be too much work.
We need to get a billing system in place - but that should be managed when we upgrade to the next major version of our chosen panel.
We need to get clients. yeah... Clients. As I said, we have two clients at the moment, but both of them are clans we're sponsoring.
And lots more.
I dare say as we progress to going live, and then throughout our first few weeks we'll run in to lots of other issues, but we're looking good for the moment.
Anyway, happy gaming. I'm off to investigate setting up CoD4 on linux now.
(this post has been sitting in a firefox window for the past two days. As such, it's probably really disjointed. You'll live
)
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