[gowans07]

I know some people pay for game server hosting and was wondering if anyone actually hosts their own servers? Is it possible to make any money from hosting game servers? Or do the big named companies just dominate the market?

[estel]

I'm sure that you could do this profitably if you wanted to, but I think you'd need to do it at a huge scale to make it reasonably profitable. I imagine it's an industry with a huge support overhead.

[gowans07]

yeh what i thought then, seems theres no simple/easy way to make money with computer these days without a large amount of effort

[Intriguing Alias]

(Original post by gowans07)
yeh what i thought then, seems theres no simple/easy way to make money with computer these days without a large amount of effort

Well not unless you actually have a good idea. There's always kickstarter

[ct2k7]

It can be easy to host gaming servers.

Why a company that I am affiliated with does is to host the server in a datacenter, then sell spaces / slots on those servers. Note that these servers are quite powerful with multiple SSDs in RAID.

[estel]

(Original post by gowans07)
yeh what i thought then, seems theres no simple/easy way to make money with computer these days without a large amount of effort

Why should there be?

[cookednoodles]

I'm a professional game server provider, so I thought i'd answer a few questions.

There are two general types of provider, Real ones and 'fake' ones.
The most important part of a game servers is the machines and network, we can't cut corners as it's our bread and butter, a few ms can mean the difference between a server having players or not.

Real providers have their own machines and use a quality network, we even have our own stickers ! http://i.imgur.com/tktJg.jpg

It costs a huge amount to maintain networks, servers, and we have to constantly upgrade. Its really not profitable at all at small scale and the profit margins are very low due to increased competition.
and is very CapEx intensive

And there are kids in their bedroom, who resell 'mass market' servers that don't have the same quality networks (Note : Generally everything you see hosted in France), middle range machines and they can only compete on price. Who think that its an easy way to make money, and then it falls apart when they actually do the maths at 3am when their machine is down.

There are a few big players, but who wants to go to lidl for a server when they can get it from the amazing corner shop ?