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I thought you said you weren’t going to bother with etf2l? :P

Regardless, get one in the NL. Pretty much everyone in TF2 prefers NL servers as it gives people from all over europe pretty decent pings. nice-servers.com and hiperz are pretty decent. Not necessarily the cheapest, but you get what you pay for.

http://www.dedifrag.com – very stable servers, and not overfulled

If you’re adamant about the UK location, try INX Gaming. I haven’t had any issues thus far and the slots are cheap.

Actually, Karma Clan had a good server from UK and I had a pretty good ping on theirs. On any other UK server, the connection was downright shit.

Quoted from Moose

You won’t be able to play on UK servers against anyone from eastern Europe. Lithuania

I have good pings at NE servers , some other Uk servers too :)

Get a vps, run a server on it, profit.
http://www.lowendbox.com/

I have probably ran over 20 TF2 servers, 10+ minecraft servers, on different providers.
Here are few servers that I have right now:
78.47.134.226:27015 – 6$ for 3 months. ( meh server )
109.169.46.151:33333 – around 8$ a month.
It does not take much time, if you know what you are doing.
And if you don’t, you can always read tutorials around the interwebz.

Edit:
Also, when you buy a VPS you can run other things on it too.
When I was playing TF2 on a regular basis, I ran a TF2 server, a mumble server that held 30 people online, a web server (nginx) and sbnc client that was used by 6 people or so.
All of this for just under 12$.

So yea, profit.