Just wanted to take some time to write out an announcement about some of our future plans regarding the servers and to allow you guys to provide some input on this.
Our current plans for the somewhat foreseeable future are to relocate our servers to a new hosting provider.
The primary reason for this decision: I'm frankly getting annoyed by the poor condition of our current host's networking situation. We've been with our current host for perhaps 3-4 years (this predates the formation of this TF2 community as well) and, for the most part, we've been satisfied with what we were paying for. As of late, however, it's become clear that our current host simply doesn't have the capacity to withstand the occasional DDoS attack and their network (and the networks they peer with) has become detrimental and less ideal to hosting game servers like ours.
So, here's the upside:
1. We're going to be buying brand new beefy hardware. This should translate into more server capacity, and we can think about expanding our servers to run more gamemodes (surf, slender, etc) in the future. It's hard to tell just how many more servers we'll be able to run just yet, but once we're situated at our new host we'll be able to see.
2. We're going to be on a better network that should alleviate some of the complaints we all share about random ping (300+) spikes that last hours on end for only certain groups of players.
And here's the downside:
Our server is currently located in Dallas, Texas which places it roughly in the center of the United States networking-wise. Our new server is going to be located near Montreal, Canada; namely in Beauharnois. This means that, due to the laws of physics and the wonderful limit to the speed of light, some players located on the west coast will inevitably have a higher ping to the new location.
It (hopefully) won't be too bad for the majority of our players, and after some spot checking with a few people located in California they reported only getting 30ms over what they currently get. One reason for this is due to
our new host's US network. If you live near one of the cities marked as a "Point of Presence" you should generally get favorable latency. If not, your latency may be higher.
If you're curious about how your ping will be (and I know I definitely am), please use
this speedtest site and post what kind of ping you're getting compared to what you currently get when on our servers right now and the general location where you live.
The time frame for all of this is roughly during the second week of October, as that's the time of our current billing cycle and we'll want to ensure we have a full month to evaluate the move and not have to pay for more months of extra hosting than we need to. Since we'll inherently be paying for another server during the move, that time would be ideal if anyone is looking to
donate and support us.
Additionally, another thing that will inherently be changing is that our servers will be getting new IP addresses. If you have our servers favorited, this should hopefully be painless as Steam should automatically update your favorites to include our new IPs.
09:26
Nov 23 2024
