What are pros and cons of dedicated servers vs game servers?

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Edge100x
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What are pros and cons of dedicated servers vs game servers?

Post by Edge100x »

Some of the pros of dedicated servers are that they:

- Offer additional flexibility -- you can run almost anything you want on them, including your own webserver or voice server
- Allow you to run as many servers as you want for a flat fee -- you're constrained only by the performance of the machine
- Can be quicker to set up for an experienced administrator -- if you need to download huge amounts of files from an existing server FTP, you can do it directly instead of manually downloading the files and uploading them again through a game server's FTP
- Can offer cost savings when large numbers of servers are involved or when you expect servers to be empty most of the time

Some of the cons of dedicated servers are that they:

- Do not come with a free trial period
- Potentially have a higher monthly commitment
- Are not automatically backed up and maintained by NFO -- you have to do backups, OS updates, and game updates yourself
- Require additional knowledge and effort to configure and run
- Do not come with direct support apart from issues with the hardware and bandwidth (unlike game servers, which come with broad support for a wide variety of things)
- In the unlikely event that you break the machine, additional fees would be involved (however, any problems with the hardware or bandwidth will not result in fees for you).
- Don't allow you to run servers that are quite as fast as NFO's separately-sold game servers.
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