Insomnia365 Game Server

INTRODUCTION

When ID announced that Quake would be a multiplayer game only I didn’t know what to think. In fact I seem to remember writing about it on this very site being very skeptical arguing that people first and foremost wanted to have a solid single player experience. How wrong I was.

Had I thought a bit longer I probably would have figured out that multiplaying was the future. Even when playing in the arcades one of the cool things was to either just compete with fellow gamers for the top score or even play against them on the same arcade cabinet. So why would playing on the computer be any different?

Since the early days with Nethack, MUD, Quake and Duke Nukem 3D things have evolved a lot. These days very few games come without a multiplayer component and in many cases it is the main thing with the single player campaign serving as training for the “real thing”.
Playing with others usually is easy. You fire up the game, us the in-game browser and find a game to play. That usually works great if you’re a lone-wolf but as soon as you become a small group of people playing, maybe a clan or just a bunch of gaming friends, things get a bit more complicated. Now you need to find a server where you all can play. As long as you aren’t in control over that server you are at the mercy of the administrator. A better solution is to host your own server.

Setting up your own game server actually is pretty easy. Most games have a free server-component that can be downloaded and set up either under Linux or Windows. The problem of course is that you first of all need a server and second of all you need the bandwidth. So setting up the server at home might not be the best option.

The Planet has a game server line called Insomnia365 which promises not only to give you a good server for your games but also make it easy to administrate and set up the games. We got a opportunity to test a server for a few months and on the following pages we’re going to tell you what was cool and what was less cool with this whole package.

THE SPECIFICATIONS

The Insomnia365-package comes in several flavors.

The cheapest server probably isn’t the best to get if you intend to host more than one game (or a larger BF2 server) but I recommend checking out in the forums at theplanet.com to discuss the requirements of the particular game you want to host before deciding which server to get.

Each server can be had with RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0 or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and the control panel that is use is Cortex (more about that later though).

Included with Every Server

• Flexible monthly agreements
• Premium grade hardware
• 99.9% Service Level Agreement
• Full Root access
• Full monitoring (Ping, Service, System, Process)
• System software updates
• Private VLANs
• Linux, Windows or FreeBSD
• Managed DNS
• Free 24 Hour Live Technical & Sales Support
• Orbit(TM) Customer Control Portal

• Arbor PeakFlow DDoS Detection
• Cisco Guard DDoS Mitigation
• Urchin Web Stats

Free 24 Hr Live Sales & Support

• Available via telephone, chat, e-mail and tickets
• On-site hands and eyes
• Administration from Certified Engineers available

Free Orbit(TM) Customer Control Portal

• Secure access to all your servers and your account
• Reboot-On-Demand
• Manual reboot requests
• Live, up-to-date bandwidth reporting
• Administration reporting
• Hardware tracking
• Domain registration
• Accounting tools
• Specials on additional services
• Robust ticketing system

In addition to these features you can also add more stuff including upgrading from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps on the servers that only got 10 Mbps as standard as well as get backup-solutions and control panels for the actual server (Plesk, Cpanel or Helm).