Forum

Yeah, we are fully aware of that :(

I’m also aware that there are companies around that kick you out if you get a ddos (we instead do the opposite, just buy bond additional pipes…) or that kill your server when using memory in excess (we frequently see tf2 instances using as mucha s 2.5gb of ram… but we never ever kill them!)

That’s also the reason why we have everything billed, we know very well that enabling STV or keeping the server always online have consequences in term of resources usage, so we just reflect those into the prices.

We could surely find a way to provide “cheap” services, kicking out as soon as a ddos is received or kill servers in the middle of a match if they are using too much CPU or RAM… but we just do not want as we do not think that’s a workable business plan.
We are providing servers since 2010 with this brand and some of our staffers are into this market since 2003 … we do not want to make something cheap and self destroy in 6 months.

We are here to stay and to make people happy :)

you’d still make a profit if you ran it alone :p

Quoted from Spike Himself

If your audience is only competitive teams, all you have to do is take away any possiblility of customers being able to install resource heavy addons such as sourcemod. As if by magic, you can now sell for less than half the price! :)

I would run a GSP myself but I can’t be arsed with all the billing hassle. I know one thing for sure; I’d sell one and the same package to everyone. No silly “performance kit” bs (what does that even mean??) or pay-per-slot silliness. 24 slot, 8 slot stv, access stv’s through a web interface; all for only 4 euros. Maybe 5 euros if you really need a control panel (trust me, you don’t). I’d even make a decent profit on that (150~200%) if enough people buy.

If I had to add 40% tax on top of that, like Hiperz claim to need to, I’d still make a profit…

Performance kit = make use of the low latency patches we have in our RT preemt kernels
We do not run standard linux kernels, but only and exclusively special tuned -rt kernels…

http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/real-time-linux-kernel-scheduler?page=0,0

If you ever tried one of those you should know very well the a tf2 process set in RT (performance kit = process set as RT) eats way more cpu then a process running with SCHED_RR and low priority.

Enabling STV leads to impressive memory leaks, that’s why we have it optional

I’m not sure what’s your real world experience on running a gameserver host.

Did you ever got ddosed like we do daily?
Do you have any idea how much does a 10gbit uplink / filtering costs?

I can understand that’s a personal opinion and maybe it’s our vision too much focused toward perfection compared to what people are looking for.
But we do really hate to impose limits (I would never ever sell a “capped” server where one could not install sourcemod!) and we do not want for any reason ever say to a customer: shut up, go away you are costing us too much due to your costats ddos or you server using 100% cpu all day because you put it into a gather pick up site.
We are fine with that and we love being able to deliver that kind of services to whom can appreciate it.

Please keep in mind that some money you pay for the server also is used to pay the support staff that fix sourcemod installs and help our beloved customers in any way possible.

I really cannot find a way to provide servers at 4eur/each one with 24slots + stv unless you start doing what I was saying before: kick out people randomly when using too much resources or tell them “the server is offline, wait untill it’s fixed” or “there’s a ddos, we are waiting for it to finish”
But that does not meet our expected quality of standard, so we stay away from that kind of practices.

Quoted from Spike Himself

[…]

If all you do is sell servers to a very specific audience, you don’t need employees.

You need at least two people: one in billing and one in tech.
We are not talking about kinds giving around servers for a few bucks, we are talking about real companies that gets seized and heavily fined in case of fiscal errors or similar failures!

evcz what do you think is the minimum spec required to run a solid 6v6 server both with and without STV? Just wondering what your experiences are. I rented a 1 GB Xen VPS thinking it would be enough for scrims but it seems to run out of memory all the time.

Quoted from atmo

evcz what do you think is the minimum spec required to run a solid 6v6 server both with and without STV? Just wondering what your experiences are. I rented a 1 GB Xen VPS thinking it would be enough for scrims but it seems to run out of memory all the time.

we did many tests, running on virtualized and para virtualized environments results in very poor servers.

We run only on bare metal, not exceptions.

I’ve no experience about min ram needed, our smaller boxes have 16gb of ram.
To give a ballpark figure put 300mb of OS footprint and at least 1.5gb of ram for the tf2 instance if running a server with stv

I don’t think it’s right to accuse evcz of providing an overpriced service unless you can name another provider who provides a better service for a lower price (and prove it).

The fact that hiperz has been in business for a long time proves that there is an audience that is happy to pay a premium price for the service they get. If the price is too high for your budget, there are a lot of alternatives with varying ratios of quality/price available.

Quoted from hiperz-evcz

by the way Spike Himself

I’m not here fighting!

Me neither, I don’t get where all these assumptions come from..

I’m sorry if anything I said offended you, that wasn’t my intention.

Quoted from skeej

I’m even surprised you thought it was even worth replying to people with no experience running a GSP claiming they could do it better.

I don’t see anyone in this thread claiming that they could do “better” (which is very subjective anyway). Why the aggression?