Hosting multiple game servers without breaking the bank?

[24jared]

Hey yall I'm new around here and I apologize if this isn't the right place to post but after looking around a bit it seams like it is.

Me and my group of friends have been wanting to host a few games that we all play and I am finally in a position financially to do it but I don't want to spend all my money doing it. What kind of used hardware would I be looking that could serve at most a couple dozen people on roughly 3 different games.

The games would be valhuiem, space engineers, and path of titans. The big one of those 3 would be space engineers given how simulation heavy it is.

I'm trying to make it out for as little money as possible but I know I'll have to shell out at least a few hundred bucks and i have experiance building custom PCs but as far as what to look for with server equipment I'm at a loss. Thank you in advance!

 

[unwind-protect]

Are those game servers multi-threaded?

 

[rtech]

If you have 2 PCs you should install the games you want on your PC and test it out and use it as baseline and proceed from there.
- add more cores
- get ECC ram if you want this to more reliable
- stay with high frequency low core count desktop CPUs?
- will the game server need powerfull GPU?

etc.
You could also browse game forums or ask people who already have such servers and ask them couple of questions.

btw do you have static IP address? How would these people reach your server ?

 

[marcoi]

if your on a budget, stick to consumer hardware for now. If you have a spare gaming pc. you can use that to get started.
Select a higher freq processor over cores. Try for at least 8 cores
Try to get at least 32GB ram or more.
SSD or NVME storage.

I would run a free hyper vision like xcp-ng or proxmox. ( you may be spending time learning how to run them)

Once setup, create a Three Virtual Machines (VM) using ubuntu linux iso images. ( you could create one, get it setup and clone it to two others)
For the two lower spec game servers, give them specs 2 cores ea and 6GB Ram
Give Space engineer 4 cores and 12GB ram
that equals 8 cores 24GB Ram (some ram is needed to run hypervisor)

Depending on what you end up using for hardware you can increase/decrease the memory.

I run one large VM for all my gaming servers, but i usually the only one using them. You can also try that approach but if you mess up the system all three go down.

Once ubuntu is installed, download and install steamcmd (assuming that is what you are using for games) and install the games.

Making sure you're not a bot!

So there is a bit of learning involved. There may be other ways like dockers etc that someone created the game servers in, but still some learning.
The alternative is paying for some gaming services, where they automate the backend setup so you can just focus on playing for a monthly cost.

If you go through all the effort of setting this up, make use of the VM backups so you can take snapshots of VM before major changes and easily restore back.

You will also have to deal with exposing the game server to the internet or getting everyone on you network to play. That is another topic.

I dont know your experience level in IT, so this could take someone who has experience a week or so to put together and get gaming servers going or a newbie a few months to figure everything out.

Good luck with your project.

 

[MBastian]

If it's just you and your friends it probably make no sense to have all servers running at once? If yes, put them in VMs and keep them suspended or in shutdown until you want to play. Of course you need to find a convenient way to start and stop them.

 

[Greg_E]

If it's just you and your friends it probably make no sense to have all servers running at once? If yes, put them in VMs and keep them suspended or in shutdown until you want to play. Of course you need to find a convenient way to start and stop them.

XCP-ng and Proxmox make it easy to create, administer and start/stop a VM. I don't think the learning curve is too high on either of these, and free open source (I think Proxmox is open source).

 

[rtech]

You have fallen for spammer bot who had revived this topic.

 

[TrevorH]

It's the dodgy embedded link in the spammers post and the 3 year old thread necro...

 

[marcoi]

You have fallen for spammer bot who had revived this topic.

How it do that?

 

[TrevorH]

The offending post has now been moderated into /dev/null