Intro

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to start a server hosting company. Have in mind, here I only provide guidelines on it, Not the whole detailed tutorial. There are of course better ways to do so, but this should give you an idea of what thoughts and actions you should take before just jumping into it.

Okay, just to make sure you understand. That to get the most out of this post, you need to read the whole thing. You can use CTRL + F to search for specifics, but i highly recommend that new users do read everything.



Are you ready?

Before you start buying everything needed, you need to ask yourself. Are you ready to start a legit company? Do you have the experience? Will you be able to provide solid and helpful support? Do you have enough money, as you shouldn’t count on getting profit the first 4-7 months.



Now to the basics.

Don't be that 13 year old with some Christmas money, as you probably don’t know what you are going into. This is not a game, it will get serious. You need to have enough money, to support the company for a year. Yes a year, I’m not saying you need to save up or anything. Having a small job on the side, that provides enough to pay for the server’s, website’s etc. That’s good enough, just make sure you don’t run out of money, because as mentioned before. You should not expect profit within the first 4-7 months.



Experience – Do you have what it takes?

Before you do anything, you need to have plenty of experience. You are probably thinking “Well i can setup my own minecraft server!!!!”#!”#!”#” but really, all you can do is administrate one that is probably already running from the point you orderd it. What you really need, is experience with actual servers, real hardware. Like the pc you are sitting at right now, reading this post. You need to know how to setup firewall’s, ports etc. Once this is in your little cute mind, we can move on to getting experience in the game setup it self. You need to have experience with EVERY game you support, this means you need to know how to fix a broken addon in garrysmod, how to add and edit plugins for minecraft, how to troubleshoot the minecraft console log etc. The list is quite long, but these are things your paying customers expect of you to help them with.



Website/Name/look & feel, SEO & advertisement. – Basic coverage, these topics are very large. I tried to describe them the best i can.

A very important aspect of your company is the name, i made a mistake of naming it something bad. This made my company look immature, and that is bad VERY bad. So you need to think very long and hard over a name for your company. When doing so, you will find perfect names which is already taken. Use a site like godaddy or fxdomains to see if .com .org .net is free, as these are the most used endings in the world. Lets take gameservers.com as an example, when you look for gameservers you dont do gameservers.as or gameservers.ly unless that is your country code thingy. For global sites, such as a host. You need .com .net and .org to be available, else consider the name to be taken.

Another important aspect is the website itself, if you can you need to imagine your way to the “perfect” site. Then depending on your experience in html and php you can make it yourself, else if you have at least 300 dollars, you can go look for a professional website developer, or you can go look on a site like themeforest.net and find a design that reminds you of the one you created in your mind, then modify it yourself or get a friend to help, also make sure you do not pick a overly used one as that will make your site look bad too.

When creating the site, make sure you give it a very nice look and feel to it use a high quality logo. Nothing seems more amateurish than a badly produced logo. Now, a very important thing that you need to make sure you have plenty of is SEO. A good example on this, is google. When you look for things, you never go past the first page. Having good SEO will improve your sites chances of getting there. Some help on this is found on searchengineland.com more specifically this post here. Now when you have done all that, getting some good SEO is never a bad thing, all you really need is patience on this. Your site wont get on the first page over night, but now you are prepared.

Now you have a nice site, now its time to investigate the market, a good way of doing this is to look up existing hosts this is really just to give you an idea of what the price of a standard gameserver is, as when setting a price you really need to think over it first. It cant be too cheap, then people will think its either a scam or bad service. Yet it cant be too expensive, as that will make people leave. So getting the price just right is very important.

Advertisement, this is a really important factor. If you do not let people know that you are there, nothing is going to happen. You will end up like that weebly page you once created, or that website when you were 10. Advertising is very important, and i mean VERY important. You simply cant describe how important this is. I forgot to do so, and that came around and raped me very hard afterwards. Now, to the point. Google ranks depending on how many other sites, links to it. This mean, that you need to go around on forums like minecraftforum.net, look for posts where people look for help choosing the right host. Post your own host, with a good review

Now, since more and more people tend to “like” what other people think is nice too. You need to signup on sites like gsprating.com, bestminecrafthosts.com etc.



Servers – Dedicated, Colocation and more.

This can be a very large topic, but i will try and keep it short. When i say server, i don’t mean gameservers, i mean the actual server machine. The server all gameservers run on, picture it as it being Earth, all the gameservers are humans simply renting out space on it. This is the basics of what it is.

This can be handled 2 different ways, and those two only. You either rent a dedicated server from another company or you can spend alittle more cash and buy hardware put it together and colocate it in a datacenter. I suggest you look up these terms on google

What specs, price etc is right you may ask. Well, it all depends on what quality service, quantity of gameservers on one machine and the price of the services that run on it is.

Its very hard to figure out, as server size meaning ram, slots, CPU and ram insensitivity the game is. But really, also depending on specs. About 20-30 servers rangeing from 70% of your lowest package, 25% medium and 5% maximum packages. Put it his way, for every 30 servers you sell, 70% is the smallest package, 25% the medium and 5% your absolute largest package, or in ram terms 256-768, 768-1536, 1536-3072 MegaByte. This is because, most larger communities choose to host it on their own box. Where private users, small clans etc. Will choose you, so count on that

Now, the stats above, are all based of using this hardware config.

CPU: Core i7 3770k

RAM: 16-24 anything smaller will effect the maximum amount of minecraft servers on a box.

Decent motherboard, really all it need is a few ram slots, CPU (should be there, but whatever) and sata ports.

SSD: 120-256 Gb, if you are using TcAdmin as your control panel ( more on cp’s later) a 256 GB SSD for the master server, is the minimum. 120 is ok for remote servers, as really thats all you need, because as mentioned above, 70% is small 200-500 mb worlds.

Uplink: This depends, do you want to be able to take a DDoS or not. Minimum is 100/100, but the standard now a days, is 1000/1000 or 1 gbit. Then there’s 10000/10000 or 10 gbit. Lets face it, no legit traffic will reach this level, before CPU and RAM max out.

These are the basic setup of one of the machines my company used. Now, when choosing OS or Operating System. You need to have a 2 things in mind, do you have enough experience with the linux terminal to manually troubleshoot problems, or do you need a desktop environment to handle these things? Once you get it all going, you can consider changing OS later. This do require a full system format, and maybe a new control panel to go along. Because, a control panel like TcAdmin, currently do only support Windows, where GameCP only support linux. As mentioned before, more on this later.

This picture is of a dedicated server, ordered and put together by the host itself. What you will be using to start off with, is something like this, but you wont be able to manually upgrade etc. As that require that you colo by yourself. What you will get, is an ip and remote desktop or SSH access depending on os choice.