While few businesses are in the online game market, if you’ve started up a game programming company that focuses on these multiplayer online games, you’re going to need some form of online game hosting. These host servers are where the games are actually played—while some graphics and basic information is installed on the player’s computer, much of the interaction comes from the server itself. This means the server and the many players’ computers are constantly going to be sending information back and forth, and that puts some very unique pressure on the host server. Most game hosting falls into one of two categories: games that are available on the server and those that feature a number of distributed servers.
Games that run off of a server, called centralized hosting, require that the host server be able to deal with hundreds or, most likely, thousands of users online at the same time. This central server has to hold all of the data for the game environment and what goes on in it. There can be very little downtime because there are always players logged in playing the game. This means the servers have to have very fast connections to the internet and have to be very reliable. Multiple backups of the data also have to exist in case one of the servers crashes.
The other way of hosting an online game is by using distributed servers. Generally, this is the method small companies or even really dedicated gamers use because it doesn’t include the high costs of running a centralized server. As the name implies, several servers host the game. Because gamers need to get constant updates from the set of dedicated servers, having the software distributed across several servers speeds up response time. One master server, of course, is required to coordinate all of this messaging. These servers don’t have to be quite as reliable since one can go down without interrupting game play.
As you can see, if you’re thinking of running an online game, you’re going to have to do more than simply get a server to host it. You’ll need to provide your players with the most advanced servers and fastest network connections you can get. These aren’t cheap, which is why most online games do require a monthly subscription fee to play. However, once you have an array of these servers up and running, all you have to do is provide maintenance. There are even some web hosts out there that have built a collection of gaming servers. You can pay for hosting on these servers just like you would for a website, although they may be more expensive. With the growth of the online gaming industry, though, more and more of these dedicated gaming hosts are appearing, and the prices have dropped to below the cost of paying for a dedicated host every month.
