You wouldn’t know there is a credit crunch on. Houses being repossessed. People out of work, unable to go to the pub, or eat out at their favourite restaurant. People staying in with cheap bottles of vodka, and turning to old games. The economy collapsing before us.

So why are gameserver providers getting cheaper?

Well at least, you wouldn’t know if you were a gameserver host. Ever day I witness an ongoing challenge to host gameservers cheaper, and ‘better’. Claims of more affordable. Affordable to the person renting the clan server, perhaps. Affordable to the provider hosting the server?

It really hit me just now, when someone on MSN Messenger just claimed we were expensive because he could get a 32 slot Call of Duty 4 gameserver for £23.  BTW, that’s £23 for 12 months. Blimey. Ok, so there’s cheap, and there’s…..suicidal. Some people are thick.

I don’t think so. A few facts to consider:

• Power and rack prices have increased up to 6x what they were 4 years ago.
• So gameservers are far more costly to host on dedicated servers.
• Game server customers expect more, and rightly so.
• Granted server hardware is more powerful, but that doesn’t cancel out the huge cost increases.

‘Affordable’ versus ‘Cheap’ clanservers, the myth uncovered!

So you might ask, why do gameserver hosts price themselves so cheap? What do you call affordable game servers.  And I won’t try and claim this applies to every host. Economies of scale means larger hosts can push out gameservers at a cheap price, because their overheads are lower.

But the kiddie host with the one old colocated server, pushing the old 50p a slot. Do me a favour. It does not add up. So back to the point, why are these clanserver hosts doing it so cheap? And is it affordable?

In a nutshell, no.

Such gameserver hosts are very often:

• Running at a loss, because it’s only £20-£30 to lose each month
• License fees, what license fees? Are you sure your Ventrilo / Teamspeak 2 server is authorised. I’m sure you wouldn’t want it going offline halfway through a war
• Not offering the 24/7 support they claim. Do you think someone doesn’t sleep to lose money? I’d have them commited if they were.
• Unable to compete with the big players. They cannot beat their level of support, uptime, and promises. There’s nothing unique in what they offer. They are just another one of many gameserver hosts. So what’s the *only* thing they can do? You guessed it, price. They make themselves Cheaper. And most definitely they’ll be the cheapest gameserver host on the internet. Yeah, right

So why are affordable gameservers better?

With total reference to the above, any gameserver host worth its salt will not be looking at whether they can pay their hosting bills at the end of the month. They will be looking at the next 12 months, and beyond that.

I would like to think an honest, and affordable gameserver provider will not pluck prices from the sky, in order to compete on the only thing they can do- being cheap.

Clanserver providers that price themselves as affordable, are thinking about keeping in business, and won’t be running away with your rental fees.

To the boys, you remember what you were told about cheap girls? Well gameservers aren’t any different.

And finally, remember. If it looks too good to be true. It probably is.