Hosting environments and operating in the cloud is becoming more and more popular, and for good reason.  It’s cost effective and far more stable and reliable than managing your IT infrastructure in your own facility. The cost for having your own IT staff and energy alone will kill your margins.  One industry that is benefiting from this growth is the video game industry. Video games are rapidly becoming a far more profitable endeavor than even movies.  To put this into perspective, Avatar made $73 million domestically and $232.2 million worldwide in the opening weekend.  Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 generated $310 million in revenue in just the US and UK in only the first 24 hours!

The biggest reason for the popularity of video games is the online multiplayer game play. Gamers are able to interact with their peers as well as total strangers around the clock. This is making video games into much more of a social event.   What makes this possible? Dedicated game servers.

Having a dedicated piece of hardware that runs the server application provides a far more efficient and effective game play than a strict peer-to-peer scenario.  Many groups will set up their own game servers are run them from their homes.  The problem here is upstream bandwidth to run the gaming environment is limited in residential internet connections.  Having virtually unlimited bandwidth availability the vital to an optimal gaming environment.  There’s nothing more frustrating when playing a game online than a bad connection or you have a problem connecting to the host.  Anyone who has played Modern Warfare 2 knows that one the best new features is the ability to change hosts. In the past a user was chosen to be the host and if they had a bad connection everyone suffered. Or even worse, if they dropped out, the match would end. With Modern Warfare 2, if someone drops out or the host has a bad connection, it will automatically find a new host and migrate the match with minimal downtime allowing all the users to complete the match.  

The best way to prevent lousy connections or loss of connectivity to the host is to place your game server in a data center.  A data center provides not only great stability to the environment for uptime, power and security, but virtually unlimited bandwidth availability.  Once you’ve decided to take it to this step you are left with two decisions. Decide whether you would like to build your own server and place it in a co-location facility or place it in a managed server environment. The benefits here are pretty clear. A managed dedicated server eliminates all the headaches that come from keeping the server updated and allows you to essentially have your own IT do this for you.  A final item to consider is going with a Virtual Private Server or VPS. With virtualization, datacenters are able to dramatically reduce the costs and provide redundancy and failover benefits as well.  Whether you’re looking to host Unreal Tournament, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty or any PC game, and considering your own game server, think about putting this in a more stable environment.

Run your own Gaming Virtual Server with RackWire.com VPS Game Server Hosting.