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Why choose Clanhost
About to hire a gameserver for the first time but not yet entirely convinced? Migrating from another host to Clanhost? Or interested in how we proceed in our job as a gameserver host? In this page we put our best effort to answer these and other questions we hear from time to time.
Best price for quality
Clanhost is an enterprise without having profit as its goal. Our prices are based upon careful calculations of prime costs and considerations of our current position in the market. While many suppliers choose the easy way; mainly compete with price, Clanhost chooses a more lasting strategy. For starters: we're one of the few suppliers whom chose to utilise Serverius's outstanding network. Secondly our choice of hardware defends itself.
The significance of an excellent network
In order to be able to explain what makes Clanhost ascend above the competition it is required to obtain more information regarding subjects networking and hardware. As mentioned above Clanhost has - as one of few - chosen Serverius's network. Serverius is regarded as the absolute front runner in the market of high quality networking. Without paying too much attention to the technical aspects we handle the following criteria to criticize a network on its quality:
- Connections the network is built upon.
- How traffic is routed over these connections.
- Utilised network devices.
- Skills and quality offered by the people that operate the network.
The amount of connections a network is based on and the quality of these connections are of great influence to the quality this network offers. The better the mix of connections, both nationally and internationally, the lower a player's ping in an online game is. For this explanation it is safe to assume we have 2 kinds of connections that are important to a supplier such as Clanhost: connections to exchanges such as the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) and transit connections such as Level(3). Connections to exchanges such as the AMS-IX are mainly used to exchange national and small-scale international traffic between network suppliers, whereas transit connections are used for international traffic.
The combination of both exchange and transit connections is what makes Serverius as unique as it is. Apart from a direct connection to the exchange of Amsterdam (AMS-IX), Serverius also has high quality transit connections to Level(3), UUNet, KPN Eurorings and NTT/Verio. These connections make sure that the ping to your gameserver is always reduced to a minimum, which benefits the pleasure you have in gaming.
Aside from the connetions a network is built upon, the used equipment plays a significant role to ensure the quality and continuity of a network. Quality suppliers can be recognized by their usage of high quality network devices and by their redundant network infrastructure. This means the network will remain fully operational should some parts fail. This is the reason Serverius is able to offer a network uptime of 99,996% over the last 2 years. An achievement only matched by very little suppliers.
Perfect performance because of the usage of powerful servers
Powerful hardware is essential for providing a lag free gaming experience. To ensure the highest level of quality we have chosen Dell as our primary hardware supplier. Currently Clanhost is using the Dell R210 series servers with latetst generation Intel Xeon processors combined with DDR3 memory.
Efficient use of capacity
Until now we have discussed the two most important subjects regarding the price of our quality and services. The final subject to be considered has also great influence on the price. Many customers who came from another supplier told us they were mostly experiencing lag during peak hours. Peak hours being between 7 and 10 PM. Between those two times most wars are played.
The quality of a gameserver is mostly determined by the server's speed of processing the players actions. When too many gameservers are placed on one physical server, the response time of this server will increase rapidly. This increase is immediately noticable in the gameserver, causing the game no longer to play fluently. When ping latencies of all players suddenly increase, the cause is easily determined: the load is too high for the server.
Many cheaper gameserver suppliers use oversubscribing as the only method to cover for their costs. They take the risk supposedly not all gameservers would be running at the exact same time, meaning people would not notice the oversubscriptions. This may go well in most cases, but when problems eventually begin to start bad commotion easily jumps in. Clanhost does not take any risk and does not assign more gameservers to one machine than the amount of concurrent servers this machine could easily handle. We measure server occupation through a monitoring system which allows us to easily determine these server loads (CPU- and memory usage) by means of graphical display. We have our own policy not to exceed the maximum of 75% load on a processor.