It's about time....

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soja
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It's about time....

Post by soja »

That I made a testimonial for this great company.

I started out hosting a 50 slot CS:S server on an openvz virtual server from another hosting company. The server ran really well, and became very popular almost overnight. Unfortunately we fell victim to a "script kiddie" that managed to fill the 100Mbit port on that virtual server and shut down our server for hours at a time. It ended up getting our IP null routed several times whenever an attacked happened. This led to us being asked to stop putting our game server online, with threats to completely deny access to our vds.

In a bold move, having only 2 TF2 servers left running smoothly on shared hosting(and still are running fine), we spent $200 for a managed linux machine here at NFO, after hearing about their phenomenal attack protection and prevention.

The best move we ever made.

The day after the server came online we were filling up to 50/50 every day. These script kiddies kept attacking us for the next few months, sometimes taking our server down for a minute. The firewall interface NFO offers allowed me to block every single attack that came our way.

Thanks to this amazing company, our server has grown to a 62 slot beast CS:S server, pushing the limits of the E3-1270 and the source engine,
Right now, you have one server consistently using 131% of one CPU core
-John
to provide the best Zombie Escape gaming experience any server has to offer.

My personal belief when running game servers: Give the gamer the best experience possible.

Following that belief, we are #1 in the world for Counter-Strike: Source game servers. We have tweaked our servers to use the absolute most of the hardware available, most notably our bandwidth.
With our rates, all 62 of our players are able to receive ALL 66 world updates per second, resulting in insane amounts of bandwidth used.
With the burst of summer players, we are probably going to pass 10 Terabytes of bandwidth this month. If john hadn't raised the bandwidth limit, we would be paying about $100 in overages if we pre-paid for this bandwidth.

Last month we purchased another E3-1270 dedicated server, and are happily filling that with players. The first month we've had this machine, we pushed 2TB of bandwidth :)

It has been just over a year since we made the move, and there is no looking back, and no telling what NFO will enable us to do in the future.

I apologize for the wall of text, I chose what I said carefully, took forever to make this post. I cannot express my gratitude enough for what this company does!
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soja
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1 Year Later!

Post by soja »

It has been exactly one year since my NFO testimonial!

An update:
We currently host 3 dedicated machines with NFO.
(x1)E3-1270v3 running managed linux
(x2)E3-1270v1 running managed windows.

These machines are all nearly full and provide amazing performance, and they have been discounted 2-3 times in the time we have used them(Our original 1270v1 was $230/m I think, now $160 with HDD).

We also use 5 VDS's scattered around the world.

(x1) Unmanaged linux-only VDS in Chicago running a TS3 NPL
(x1) Unmanaged linux-only VDS in Frankfurt running a game server for our EU gamers
(x1) Managed linux 3-core VDS in LA for our TF2 servers we moved to NFO earlier this year
(x2) Unmanaged linux VDS's in NYC for our web/SQL hosting.

Overall, we push over 21TB of bandwidth through NFO Chicago every month, and we aren't stopping anytime soon :) (inc 4th dedicated server!).

We also are still using NFO's middle package web hosting ($8/m) and are pushing over 6TB/m through that.

NFO is still the absolute best GSP I have ever used, and I will argue that to anyone who says otherwise. We look forward to a bright future with this company.
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Re: It's about time....

Post by rymax99 »

Definitely a good read and a definitive success! I wish you the best of luck with all of your current game server ventures, and the continued growth you're planning on.
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Re: It's about time....

Post by soja »

rymax99 wrote:Definitely a good read and a definitive success! I wish you the best of luck with all of your current game server ventures, and the continued growth you're planning on.
Thanks!
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Re: It's about time....

Post by J-English »

Ranked number 1 in the world for a zombie css server,and the man lives right here at NFO!
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Re: It's about time....

Post by soja »

A quick update to this:

We ordered and are currently using our fourth dedicated server here at NFO for our move into CS:GO, and for our large GMOD server(see signature). We purchased another v3 machine for the raw CPU horsepower needed for a 64 slot CS:GO server, and a 95 slot GMOD server.

Here is our usage graph for the CS:GO server(running 64 tick):
Image
Yes, that is 150% CPU usage for my CS:GO server process when full.

And here is our GMOD server(22 tick, 95 slot):
Image
This process is also using near 150% CPU when full.

Thankfully with the CPU we have for this machine, and turbo speeds up to 4Ghz, both of these servers are near butter smooth when full :)

Great job NFO, looking forward to the 5th box :)
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Re: It's about time....

Post by soja »

I feel like posting this a day early this year :)

It has been a year since my last review-type post, and boy has it been an interesting one :)

We have scaled up quite a bit, and are currently renting Six Managed dedicated servers, which are a mix of E3-1271v3's, E3-1270v3's, and E3-1270's. Each of these machines is loaded around 50% at peak, with some room left for expansion. We have 2 of these machines over in Frankfurt at the moment, and that location has been great for us.

In addition to the 6 managed dedis, we have the 12-core VDS package we use for games that are not supported in the NFO Managed system.

We also continue to use copious amounts of bandwidth, since all of our servers are srcds-based :)
In the month of June, we used a total of 55.3TB of gaming-only bandwidth! That's 45TB for Chicago, and 10.3TB for Frankfurt, in one month.

We moved our fastdl to an external host, one that sacrifices network quality for network quantity. We needed more customization for permissions, allowing multiple people to access fastdl with different permissions. We also continue to upload nearly 20TB/m of fastdl files across all of our servers.

NFO continues to be the best GSP available, and we are looking forward to another great year with the company :)
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