Solution for Selling Game Servers

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Ubiquity's services are used by a number of successful companies to sell game hosting services. Over time, we have developed a complete solution that follows - fully detailing what we believe is the best way to succeed as a game hosting company - allowing us to work with you with the most mutual success.


Contents

Foundations of your Game Server Company

Before you get started selling game server, you will need to make some decisions about the underlying software. Through years of experience in this industry and seeing what options work and don't work for our customers - we strongly recommend looking at each of the following before you get started.


Billing / Support / Automation

You will need a billing system to sell game servers. Many options will work, however Ubiquity recommends WHMCS as the solution for this. This costs roughly $20/month, and has fantastic support backing it. This will act as your billing center, signup system, account creation system, affiliate referral system, customer support center, and registrar / domain management system all rolled into one piece of software. Certain features - such as automation with TCAdmin - we believe you'll find are far more advanced than all other options currently on the market. We strongly recommend also employing a fraud mitigation system as well - such as MaxMind - which plugs right into WHMCS and only costs a few pennies per transaction. This tool generally saves most game hosting start-ups hundreds if not thousands in lost revenue right away from charge-backs by looking at the legitimacy of the request, and even going so far as calling your customer to verify the order if you would like it to do so.


Payment Gateways

There are basically two methods of accepting payments. You can register for a free PayPal Business account on PayPal.com, or register for a merchant account with a company such as CDG Commerce to accept credit card payments directly - who allows you to use their Quantum gateway for free if you do (meaning no payment gateway fees - which competing services like authorize.net that you would otherwise need would cost you). Both of these systems of accepting payments work very easily through modules already built into WHMCS.


Control Panel / Game Server Files

We recommend TCAdmin for your game server control panel, which we will license for $10/month - and has an unbelievably nice integration with WHMCS. You may set up an FTP server for your own game files if you plan to maintain this yourself (explained below), or you may use our game files if your server runs on our network.


Recommended Complimenting Services=

If you are able to do well selling game servers - many providers have a lot of success packaging in web hosting and offering dedicated game server plans to their clients through our server reseller program. Once you've mastered this, we strongly recommend checking out our Solution for Selling Web Hosting as well as our Solution for Selling Dedicated Servers. Furthermore, it would be wise to complement your Game Servers with a voice product, such as Ventrilo (through a private-label Ventrilo reseller system such as DarkStar RCS, as Ventrilo does not license new companies) or Teamspeak (which is less popular, but direct licenses are easily obtained).


Recommended Ubiquity Server Solution

Most game server start-ups we have seen make a lot more mistakes about their infrastructure than the average client. Most come to Ubiquity very set in their ways; generally far less willing to take our IT advice than some our Enterprise clients with hundreds of employees and exponentially more at stake on paper. If you've made it this far, it's likely because you know we can help you make your company successful. If you work with us, we have a strong invested interest in your mutual success, so while we may not have all of the answers, please take the following infrastructure recommendations seriously. Ubiquity works with many, perhaps even most of the most successful Game Server Providers in the industry - however we also see many fail every month for making the exact same mistakes.


General Guidelines for Game Hosting Infrastructure

Because we see so many crazy things done from game server start-ups and our advice is generally not taken - we'd first like to lay out a set of guidelines in case you don't care take our exact advice on the solutions below.


  • Don't do colocation if you have less than 10 servers. This can quickly get you in over your head in up-front costs and it will probably not save you money anyway at this stage.
  • New game server companies are the only genre of client that typically needs to be reminded of this - but colocation does also always involve remote hands fees.
    • Be sure you understand this ahead of time if you do plan to colocate, as it will need to be figured into your business model. This is explained in detail as it applies with our company here
  • If you are using colocation - never ship a server while it's still in production. There's a very long list of reasons for this; we'll give you a few.
    • The colocation world does not function as the dedicated hosting world, and we do not prioritize colocation installs ahead of supporting systems that are already in active service (expect up to 24 hours following arrival).
    • Most colocation companies you may be coming from/going to are not service-oriented as we are. Multiple other colocation companies we have seen take as long as 6 months to provision new service.
    • Shipping companies often get lost and don't get things to where they need to go in a timely fashion - even to data centers they deliver to daily.
  • Care about your clients, but realize that not every kid that's downloaded a copy of CS is a professional network engineer. You will always get latency tickets. Some are legitimate and some are not.
    • Too many companies we see move servers back and forth between providers looking for one that's connected to a different Internet until it costs them far more money than they're making.
  • If you absolutely must recompile your Linux kernel for FPS adjustments - do not experiment with a production server (try it first at home or elsewhere) and leave a stable kernel as the default.
  • The benchmark performance benefits of using a 5472 over a 5430 (or the newest possible CPU as this will quickly grow outdated), and other minor adjustments are vastly outweighed by cost.
  • If you are truly using a dedicated server for playing any game on the game hosting market right now, you will use between 2-5Mbps in 95th percentile at capacity, or definitely less than 2500GB.
    • There are not exceptions to this rule. If you are calculating slots * average usage - you are vastly over-estimating. If we are wrong, you will not be charged that first month you see anything otherwise.
    • Community (pub) boxes that you promote, do not fit this description and may potentially use more bandwidth than a hosted machine for game server customers.
  • Be close to having a server filled before ordering another and try to have your financials in the green before adding another city. Don't buy infrastructure that isn't needed / affordable yet.
  • If you are setting up your own file server for your game files it can be a Linux server. It does not require a Windows or TCAdmin license.
  • Windows 2003 Web Edition and Windows 2003 Standard 32-bit will only support 4GB of memory. Windows 2003 Standard 64-bit is strongly recommended for you for this reason.


The Recommended Solution for Game Hosting Infrastructure

If you are planning to sell dedicated servers for the first time - start with one dedicated server. Our most recent on the site Dual Xeon will likely work very well in maximizing price for performance as well as the default bandwidth plan. Memory usage will vary based on what type of games you are primarily hosting. HLDS-based games tend to use less memory than other newer games and are generally marginally more profitable to host.


For Hosting a Wide Spectrum of Newer Games 

Data Center:   Subjective  (start in Chicago or Dallas for your first server, or closest to your users)
Processor:     Dual Xeon E5520 (quad-core)
Memory:        12GB ECC-Registered RAM
Hard Disk:     1x500gb SATAII Hard Disk 
Control Panel: TCAdmin 
OS:            Windows 2008 Standard Edition  64-bit
Management:    Self-Managed    (there are currently no managed hosting services for game systems)
Bandwidth:     6000GB Data Transfer   
Port Speed:    100Mbit 

Monthly Rate:  $399


For Hosting Primarily HLDS-Based Games 

Data Center:   Subjective  (start in Chicago or Dallas for your first server, or closest to your users)
Processor:     Single Xeon E5520 (quad-core)
Memory:        6GB ECC-Registered RAM
Hard Disk:     500GB SATAII Hard Disk  (default)
Control Panel: TCAdmin 
OS:            Windows 2008 Standard Edition  64-bit
Management:    Self-Managed    (there are currently no managed hosting services for game systems)
Bandwidth:     6000GB Data Transfer   
Port Speed:    100Mbit 

Monthly Rate:  $239


Game File FTP Server (if desired) 

Data Center:   First Available
Plan:          Infinity VPS
Storage:       60GB
Data Transfer: 750GB
Control Panel: none
OS:            CentOS 5.2
Management:    Self-Managed   

Monthly Rate:  $69.95

Business Plan

Differentiation in the Game Server Market

We always say that -- unless you differ yourself from your competition by unique features, price, or customer service -- you are going to have an extremely difficult time in the Game Server industry. From what we have seen -- younger gamers are not very brand loyal when it comes to choosing a GSP. If they can get a better deal somewhere else, chances are they will switch without giving it a second thought (not to say they will not be back, especially on the quality of network that Ubiquity provides). Older gamers (out of college and beyond) are definitely a lot more brand loyal and have a greater appreciation for quality of service. Either way, you are going to need to offer a unique blend of services to attract new customers.


The Costs Behind Price Points

  • You cannot compete early on selling $0.99 game servers (and probably not once you're collocating until you have at least 20-30 machines). Doing so will leave you out of business in a week. Because -- let's be honest, at the end of the day, you still have to support these customers. The only way you can ever charge $0.99 is by indicating that it's entirely self-managed (I.e., no support is offered) and giving them the option to re-install their game server.
  • If you plan on offering decent support (be up front about your support level), you are going to want to charge at least $2.00 per player. Otherwise, you will not have enough cash at the end of the month to pay your support staff (unless you can get volunteers, which we've found does not work for a "longer-than-3-day" solution). 


There are no set amount of slots that a game server can hold.
It varies greatly by Game, and the % utilization of your servers.

Generally we have found that a Dual Xeon E5520 with 12 GB of RAM can hold 
around 60 active customers at any given time, with a mixture of 
Call of Duty 4, Team Fortress 2, and CS 1.6. Obviously the more you have 
of the higher-usage games, the number will drop, and vice versa.

It's all about shooting for average revenue per customer in the game server 
market. If you're renting a powerful machine (Dual Xeon E5520 with 12 GB of 
RAM and 1 500 GB SATA II drive), you're looking at $399/month with TCADMIN. 
You will have merchant fees (figure 5% of costs), and support fees 
(varies depending on your model). Let's assume though that it means that 
your costs per machine are $419/month.

$419 / 30 customers ~= $14.00 per customer in costs, excluding support.

It's certainly not cheap. You should strive to average at least $30.00 
(or more, realistically) per customer if you're not offering any support.

If you're any offering support, you should probably times that number by 1.5.

Now, if you're collocating a machine, your costs should only be around ~$150 
per machine after bandwidth. This is where the profits come from, but it is 
too unrealistic in the beginning due to up-front costs (unless you have a lot 
of start-up capital to spend on $3,000+ servers).

How to Make your Services Truly Private-Label

It's easy to remove nearly all traces of Ubiquity Server Solutions and the control panel vendor from your services, creating the feel of a complex and completely in-house developed operation.


Branding

This can be adjusted by uploading custom branding to your TCAdmin master server. Your WHMCS client management can also be customized via the SMARTY template system.


Network and Whois

Ubiquity IP ranges are associated with the Nobis Technology Group rather than Ubiquity - making them as ambiguous as is technically possible by themselves from the on-set. Reverse DNS entries can be set to show your company name in both VPS and dedicated servers (see Modifying the Reverse DNS Configuration of an IP) and dedicated server clients can even place their own whois contacts on their IP ranges using SWIP (see Requesting your name be placed on an IP whois report (SWIP)).

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