HostedGameServers.com 2 Year Anniversary!
Hello all! We’ve actually made it to our two year anniversary. It’s been a bumpy road, but we’re here to stay for a very long time. Today starts our first sale of 20% off any new purchase for 1 month to celebrate! We are also going to have weekly sales to certain game servers we host. I am Andrew, co-owner of HostedGameServers. I wanted to tell you a little about us and our background. I am a 21 year old student with a major in Computer Engineering and a minor in Networking. I am also learning computer security. I joined the company the second month that it was conceived. I do everything and anything HGS needs. You will see me on support, adding code to the site and administering boxes.
The Founder and owner of HGS is Eric. He is 25 and recently hired at Valve. Eric has a wife and two kids. Eric also does a little bit of everything as he can. Eric is more of the Jedi Master and I am his Padawan.
Our newest helper is Joe, I am sure you seen him helping you with support. He has helped us a lot with Minecraft. If you installed Craftbukkit I am sure you watched his videos on the forums. What you didnt? Well check them out.
Another man I have to mention is Greg. Greg sometimes does support, but mostly he works on the back end with the servers. Greg fights DoS attacks, looks for security issues and performance tunes kernels and configuration files a like.
Something important to know is that we are doing this all for free right now. HGS does not provide enough money to support wages for the team. We run HGS purely out of love for the service. We hope to some day get to the point where we can write ourselves a full living salary – but we’re not there yet.
Here is a little background how we got started and how we went through the last two years. The way HostedGameServers got started was back in June 2009. Eric had always wanted to start a game server company and he finally just did it. I (Andrew) met him on a Ventrilo server several years back. I helped him out with the company in the beginning. I didn’t know anything about Linux or hosting game servers. I jumped on to learn a few things, and learn I did.
There are actually still a few clients with us from the very beginning and I am really glad they stuck around. Prior to HostedGameServers.com we we’re called Hostedd.com. Eric wrote the original site in php using vim. Our first boxes were actually VMs we rented. We thought these can handle the server load, but we found out within a month that we needed a dedicated server. It was not the best name, site, or servers, but it got us going and got our name out there. We used http://www.swiftpanel.com/ for our control panel. It worked out nice, but the creator either died or gave up and has not announced anything for years now.
Going into this with no money we had to come up with enough profit to make the move to our first dedicated box. We finally did and in November 2009 with our first box in Montreal, Ontario named omega came online. Little did we know that the kernel needed to be recompiled to handle high performance servers. We edited the kernel, but omega never seemed to boot with the edited kernel. So instead of having downtime to keep trying we left it. After much research we found its with the os we use, centos. This link was helpful, but it was months before we got it. A couple of weeks later after omega we got enough money to get another box in Montreal. We named it Atom, this one we were able to get the kernel to work. So it was a prime child for all games that needed the performance. This posed a problem because we didn’t have enough money to buy another box and we knew we needed to leave Montreal to get a better location. At the same time we were losing money. We got down to -75/month profit, the panel we were using wasn’t providing what we needed, we weren’t pulling the traffic to stay a float for long. This was making us think of closing the site and maybe relaunching later. What saved us was a game called Minecraft.
This was around our 1 year of August 2010. Eric said screw it and made his own panel which we use now hgspanel.hostedgameservers.com. We got word press and built a new site so it looks more professional. Minecraft was released and really started helping us pull in the money to keep going. We had one month to do all of this, our plan was to relaunch on October 31, 2010. We saw an instant turn around with the new site and we made it very high on the minecraft google search. At this time we still only had omega and atom. With in a few days we had to expand, we decided to go with quadranet for our provider. Their prices were very reasonable, so we got a Dallas box and named it Zeta. This was quite an upgrade for us compared to our old boxes. Between November 2010 – April 2011 we saw our biggest growth so far it was mostly all minecraft server. We bought 20 boxes total in Pennsylvania, Miami, Los Angeles and still expanding.
What should you expect in the future of HostedGameServers? Well the same great service and price for years to come. The next path for us is windows and all the games that has to offer. We are going to keep expanding in the United States and eventually to Europe. We wont stop and we hope that you stick with us. Thank you for taking the time and reading this.Thank you for supporting us, you are making this possible.
So you made it to the end? Sweet! Here’s your reward! 20% off any new purchase, use this promocode on the pay page when you order “hgs2year“. Enjoy!