The upload/download speeds debate rages on in the online gaming community and it can get pretty confusing sometimes. With opinions all over the spectrum and the discussions more and more complex, deciding what kind of services you need to start your own gaming VPS may seem a bit intimidating.
That’s why we’ve decided to take a look at the key issues in the debate and let you know, once and for all, just what role download and upload speeds actually play in online gaming.
Upload vs Download Speeds in Gaming VPS
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The differences between your download and upload speeds and how they affect your online gaming experience lie at the heart of the debate. You may have noticed that the speed with which you can download a video is not remotely the same as the one with which you can upload a video to YouTube, for example. That’s pretty standard in-home internet connections and normally not that important. But if you’re into online gaming, then it’s a different matter entirely.
Games can take up quite a bit of your bandwidth. Bandwidth is another way of saying how much data you can send and receive over a fixed amount of time, usually a second. So if your home connection has a 12Mbs, that means you should be able to send and receive 12 megabits or 4 megabytes per second. How much of that is reserved for download and how much for upload depends on your Internet Service Provider, however.
Playing Games Online – Important Factors
When using your PC or gaming console to play Call of Duty online, for example, it’s your download speeds that matter the most, since you mostly receive data packets from the server and only send small amounts of information in return. Of course, there are other factors like latency or peering, which we’ll discuss later, but mostly you’re downloading data.
What about hosting games?
Hosting games are the opposite. When you’re hosting a game, on a gaming VPS, for example, you’re the one sending all those data packets. So you need a considerable bandwidth that can support about 2 to 5 Mbps for each one of your clients. By clients, we mean the ones that will use your gaming server to play online. When your clients are just one or two friends living in your neighborhood, then your home connection might be enough. Any more than that, though, and you need to start thinking about hosting your own VPS game server so click here for more information.
Latency, and Bandwidth in Online Gaming
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Now that we’ve established the importance of upload speeds and bandwidth for hosting your own online gaming server, it’s time to discuss other factors that affect the gaming experience for you and your clients. Latency is one of these factors and an important one at that. You don’t want your clients to experience lags or have their game freeze just when they’re on a winning streak. To run a game server with a good reputation, you need very low latency and one way to ensure that is to use a VPS game server or maybe even a dedicated gaming server. Doing so guarantees really low latency, which along with a high bandwidth, improves the overall quality of your clients’ gaming experience.
While a dedicated gaming server offers great features, it can be more than a little pricey. A much more reasonable choice would be finding a good gaming VPS provider that offers high-bandwidth plans. The best game VPS would be one that offers low latency, high upload speeds, and also good peering. Now let’s take a look at what peering means and why it’s important in hosting online games.
Peering and Gaming VPS
Now suppose you’ve got a server with great upload speeds and really low latency. But what if its servers are located in East Asia and your clients are in Europe? That would really sink your hosting capabilities and make for a poor gaming experience. Peering is essentially about server location and it’s another important factor in online gaming, especially game hosting. When selecting a gaming VPS plan, you need to pay attention to the available server locations offered by the provider. You don’t want US servers when your main user base is in Australia, for example.
Choosing a Provider
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Now that you know which factors are influential, it is time for you to opt for a VPS plan. You will find different providers and hosting solutions for what you need, but it is important to find a reliable one and also not to spend a fortune. Peering, latency, bandwidth are some of the most important things to inquire about and now that you know what effect they have, you know which questions to ask. Make sure you schedule a call before you proceed with the purchase of the package you like!
The importance of a call is that you can receive more information about these things and how they are sorted out. After that check the pricing packages that are offered and opt for the one you find most suitable.
Conclusion and Takeaways
So let’s review and recap what we discussed. If you’re just planning on playing online games on your PC or console, then download speeds are what matter the most. Hosting games is completely different, however, and a high bandwidth that can assign about 2-5Mbps to each client is simply necessary. Since that kind of bandwidth is hard to come by in plans offered by your usual ISPs, you need to think about getting a gaming VPS plan.
Much more affordable than dedicated servers, a good VPS can provide low latency, high bandwidth, and good peering. With a 1Gbps bandwidth and more than 3TBs of traffic,
