My company magas a few servers but we are not currently hosting games.  Honestly I do not know much about game hosting, but we have customers who are interested in that kind of service.  Is it prudent for me to host games on one of our Linux servers that is already being used as a shared hosting server or should we outsource?  What would be the costs involved?

Our current inquiry is for Counter strike source hosting.

Thanks for any advice.

1) It is usually best to keep game servers and shared servers on seperate boxes. That way you can offer a package that gives the client a game server and a shared webserver, and allows them to setup sv_downloadurl (counterstrike: Source) and download custom content off the webserver. If it were me, I would make them seperate. It\'ll make your customers gaming experience alot better.

2) Well you can fit a good amount of counterstrike: source servers on one server. A dual processor server with a good amount of memory and a 100mbit port would be best. SCSI drives are said to help, but I don\'t believe that.
You will also need some kind of control panel. I use webmin, but thats hard to configure for each new client. However, there was a big thread at WHT about game server control panels you might be able to dig up.

3) Installing a Counterstrike: Source server on Linux is very easy, in fact installing any game is very easy. Just visit Gameservernews . I have completed a good amount of his tutorials, so if you need any help dont be afraid to ask.

Any more questions?