Use case · Gaming
Game server hosting
Game server hosting for multiplayer games is latency-critical — players need low ping, so servers must be well-connected and near players. It rewards strong per-core CPU performance, needs strong DDoS protection since games are heavily targeted, and must stay reliable during play. Bare metal gives full, consistent performance. Dedicated, well-connected EU infrastructure keeps game servers fast and player data sovereign.
Key points
- Multiplayer game servers are latency-critical — players need low ping to servers.
- Servers should be well-connected and located near the players they serve.
- Many game servers reward strong per-core CPU performance, not just many cores.
- Games are heavily targeted by DDoS attacks, so strong DDoS protection is essential.
- Bare metal gives the full, consistent performance game servers need, in the EU for sovereignty.
What does game server hosting need?
Game server hosting runs the authoritative servers for multiplayer games — the servers that coordinate players, run the game's simulation, and keep everyone in sync — and it is demanding in specific ways: low latency to players, strong performance, reliability during play, and defence against the attacks games attract. Players interacting in a multiplayer game depend on the server responding quickly, staying available, and treating everyone fairly, so the server's latency, performance, and reliability directly affect the experience. And because games are heavily targeted by attacks, defending the servers matters too. These needs shape what game server hosting must provide.
The player experience makes these demands sharp, since players feel latency, lag, and downtime immediately and are frustrated by them. A laggy or unreliable game server ruins the experience, so game server hosting has to deliver low latency, consistent performance, and reliability to a degree players notice, along with protection against the attacks that would take servers down. This page focuses on hosting game servers; related cases such as game backends and specific games are covered on their own pages, while what follows attends to what running multiplayer game servers specifically requires.
Latency: the defining concern
Latency — the delay between a player's action and the server's response, felt as ping — is the defining concern of multiplayer game server hosting, because players need low latency for the game to feel responsive and fair. In a multiplayer game, players' actions are processed by the server and reflected to others, and high latency makes the game feel laggy and unfair, so low latency is essential to a good multiplayer experience, especially in fast-paced or competitive games where small delays matter. This makes minimising latency to players a primary goal of game server hosting.
Because latency depends heavily on the distance between players and the server, game servers are located near the players they serve and are well-connected. The further a player is from the server, the higher their latency, so games place servers in regions near their players, and the servers use good, low-latency network connectivity to minimise the delay. This is why game server hosting emphasises well-connected infrastructure in locations near players. We provide well-connected infrastructure for game servers, so that the servers can serve players with the low latency multiplayer games need, which is central to game server hosting given how directly latency affects the player experience.
Performance: per-core CPU matters
Game servers often benefit particularly from strong per-core CPU performance, because a game's simulation frequently runs in a way that depends on the speed of individual cores rather than many cores. Many game servers run the game's core simulation logic in a manner that does not spread easily across many cores, so the performance of individual cores — how fast each core is — matters more than the total core count for these workloads. This is different from workloads that parallelise across many cores, and it means game servers can reward processors with strong per-core performance, not just high core counts.
This shapes the hardware suited to game servers: processors with strong single-core performance, so the game simulation runs quickly, alongside enough cores to run the number of game server instances a machine hosts. A server hosting game servers benefits from fast cores for the simulation each runs, and enough cores and memory to host the instances. The exact needs depend on the game and how many instances a machine runs. We provide servers with strong per-core performance suited to game servers, alongside the cores and memory to host the instances, so that the game simulation runs fast on capable cores — matching the hardware to what game servers, with their often per-core-sensitive performance, actually need.
DDoS protection
Games are among the most heavily targeted workloads for denial-of-service attacks, so strong DDoS protection is essential to game server hosting, since an unprotected game server can be taken down by attacks players face routinely. The competitive and social nature of games means players attack each other's connections and game servers with denial-of-service attacks, whether to gain advantage, retaliate, or disrupt, so game servers face these attacks as a matter of course. An attack that overwhelms a game server takes it down, ending matches and ruining the experience, so defending against these attacks is not optional for game server hosting but a core requirement.
Providing this means DDoS protection that absorbs and mitigates the attacks game servers face, keeping them available under attack. Protection that detects and filters attack traffic, absorbing the volume attacks bring, keeps the game servers reachable by legitimate players despite the attacks, so that an attack does not take a server down. Given how routinely games are attacked, this protection is a standing need, not an occasional one. We provide DDoS protection for game servers, so that the servers stay available under the attacks games routinely face, defending the player experience against the denial-of-service attacks that would otherwise take game servers down — which is an essential part of hosting game servers given how targeted games are.
Reliability during play
Game servers must stay reliable during play, because when a game server goes down, players are disconnected mid-game, matches end, and the experience is ruined, which players find especially frustrating. Unlike some workloads where brief downtime is tolerable, a game server failing during play immediately disrupts the players relying on it, ending their game, so reliability during active play is important to the experience. Players expect the servers to stay up while they are playing, and downtime at that moment is keenly felt.
Achieving this reliability means dependable infrastructure — reliable hardware, in datacenters with dependable power, cooling, and connectivity — so that game servers stay up during play. The infrastructure must be sound so that servers do not fail under players, and for games where availability matters greatly, further resilience helps. We host game servers on reliable infrastructure, so that the servers stay available during play and players are not disconnected by infrastructure failures — keeping the game running for the players relying on it, which matters because a game server failing mid-play disrupts exactly the players who are actively using it, at the moment they most notice.
Scaling for player load
Game server hosting must scale with the number of players and games, running more game server instances as more players play, sometimes with sharp peaks around launches or events. As a game gains players, more game server instances are needed to host the matches and sessions they play, so the hosting must provide the capacity for the instances the player load requires, and be able to add capacity as the player base grows. Games can also see sharp peaks — a launch, an event, or a busy period bringing many players at once — which the hosting must handle.
Supporting this means capacity to run the game server instances the player load needs, able to scale as it grows and to handle peaks. More players mean more instances, spread across enough servers to host them with the performance each needs; and peaks mean having or adding capacity for the busiest times. Some games spin up game server instances per match, needing capacity to do so on demand. We provide infrastructure that scales to the game server instances a player base needs, with the capacity to grow and to handle the peaks games bring, so that a game can host its players — running enough game server instances, with the performance each needs, as the player load rises and peaks.
Why bare metal suits game servers
Game servers suit bare metal well, because it gives them the full, consistent performance games need, free of the interference shared or virtualised infrastructure can bring. Game servers are performance-sensitive and latency-sensitive, and consistent performance matters for a smooth experience, so the variability that shared infrastructure can introduce — where other tenants' activity affects performance — is unwelcome. On bare metal, dedicated to the game servers, they get the hardware's full, consistent performance without that interference, which suits the steady, responsive performance games need.
Bare metal also gives the strong per-core performance and control game servers benefit from, running directly on the hardware. The full performance of fast cores is available to the game simulation, without a virtualisation layer's overhead, and the server can be configured for the game servers. For performance- and latency-sensitive game servers, this full, consistent, uncontended performance is valuable. We host game servers on dedicated bare-metal servers, so that they run with the full, consistent performance games need — the strong per-core performance for the simulation, without the interference or overhead shared or virtualised infrastructure would add — which suits the performance and consistency multiplayer game servers depend on.
Sovereignty, and where VV Internet Hosting fits
Game servers handle player data — accounts, and the personal data of European players among it — so where the servers run governs that data, making sovereignty a consideration. VV Internet Hosting is incorporated in the Netherlands, within the EU, so game servers hosted with us run under European jurisdiction and outside the direct reach of the US CLOUD Act, keeping player data under European law. For games serving European players, hosting the servers in the EU — which also suits the latency of serving European players — keeps their data sovereign.
We host well-connected, dedicated bare-metal servers for game server hosting: strong per-core performance for game simulations, the cores and memory to host game server instances, DDoS protection against the attacks games face, reliable infrastructure to stay up during play, and the capacity to scale with players — in EU datacenters under European jurisdiction, well-placed for European players. This suits games hosting their own game servers that want low latency for European players, strong and consistent performance, DDoS protection, and European sovereignty. We are clear about our limits: we provide the dedicated infrastructure the game servers run on, not the game itself or a managed game-hosting platform. We are the dedicated, sovereign, well-connected bare-metal infrastructure for game servers — and if that fits your game, we can host it well.
Related use cases
See also
Questions
Game server hosting, answered plainly
Common questions about hosting for Game server hosting.
Why is latency so important for game servers?
Because players need low latency — felt as ping — for a multiplayer game to feel responsive and fair. Players' actions are processed by the server and reflected to others, so high latency makes the game feel laggy and unfair, especially in fast-paced or competitive games. Since latency depends heavily on distance, game servers are located near players and well-connected.
Why do game servers need such strong DDoS protection?
Because games are among the most heavily targeted workloads for denial-of-service attacks — the competitive and social nature of games means players attack each other's connections and game servers routinely. An attack that overwhelms a game server takes it down, ending matches. So DDoS protection that absorbs and filters these attacks is a core, standing requirement of game server hosting, not optional.
Why does per-core CPU performance matter for game servers?
Because many game servers run the game's core simulation in a way that depends on the speed of individual cores rather than spreading across many. So the performance of individual cores matters more than total core count for these workloads — game servers reward processors with strong per-core performance, alongside enough cores and memory to host the number of instances a machine runs.
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