Understanding Gaming Server & how it differs and resembles a Webpage Server

Jul 28,2021 by Manoj Yadav

You’re on ‘Miramar’ hidden in the basement of a wrecked building and chicken dinner is just two enemies away. Luckily, you spot one of them laying an ambush in the bushes and pull out your KARK98k.

Knees bent, you close in on your enemy and trot past the garage next to the building.

On your pursuit to find a clean shot, a bullet finds your head instead and you are dead.

This happens or may have happened to every serious PUBG player.

If only you were faster than the bullet…

Understanding Gaming Server & how it differs and resembles a Webpage Server

A Dedicated Game Server Hosting is what powers your time-killer PUBG addiction so seamlessly. These powerful gaming servers are what you owe your chicken dinner to and deserve way more than what they are given credit for.

A lot goes into firing a single shot in a game, in the background especially, even though it seems as simple as a mouse click or a tender touch of your finger.

This blog will talk about what goes into giving you a seamless PUBG experience. Cutting short, we will uncover how dedicated game servers work and how they differ and resemble with a webpage server.

A Gaming Server

A gaming server works pretty much like a normal server. They both send and receive data after all.

The most popular games like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty or Minecraft, all work the same way. However, there could be minor differences in the way they establish connection with the server.

Setting up the ‘client’ and logging in

Before you can actually start playing you need to download what we call a “client” to your computer or a smartphone. A client is nothing but the game application itself. Once downloaded, the client needs a working internet connection to be able to send and retrieve data from the game servers.

Gaming applications these days ask you to login to your account to establish your identity as an authentic gamer. Once fed, the server then runs a check on the input credentials from the database.

Establishing connection with the server

After having checked the data of the player, the client gets connected to one of the servers hosting the game. Multiple servers run for the same game. Having more than one server ensures that if one of the servers malfunction, the client can be redirected to other servers for continued experience.

Multiple servers are randomly distributed all throughout the world to establish connection of a client with the nearest server thus enhancing user experience further. The closer the proximity of a player to the server, better the latency and lower is the lag.

Some players use VPN- virtual private network– to connect to servers from other countries to compete globally.

Sending data back and forth to the gaming server

Gaming server is essentially the warehouse wherein all the data exchange takes place. A server simultaneously receives and sends data to hundreds of users. While doing so, it changes the environment in the game multiple times over a second and the same changes are almost immediately conveyed to the user.

For example: if a player fires a bullet, the client i.e. the game application converts the input into a server-readable code. The server receives the signal and takes necessary actions (say decreasing opponent’s health points) through intensive calculations. The changes are then transferred as codes to all the users in the game.

The software application decrypts and converts the data received from the server into computer graphics at user’s end.

A dedicated gaming server- understanding the terminology. How close enough are dedicated gaming server and webpage server?

The choice of a dedicated server for gaming is ideal as they are able to deliver the performance that no other server can. Though the gaming servers are high-end compared to a normal dedicated server, both are setup in pretty much the same way.

A webpage server contains data necessary for a webpage to load just like a gaming server stores data required for a game to run. A webpage server does not transmit data- from and to- an end-computer as frequently as a gaming server does. The latter is almost always transferring data to hundreds of users every time.

While a webpage server is limited to send only static HTML contents for web browser, a gaming server grants access to server side logic. The former sends almost static data that does not variate much. Gaming servers do a lot more than that by processing inputs received from the clients in real-time.

A gaming server is bound to have a sound storage and processing capacity. Also, the bandwidth required to effectively run a gaming server is extraordinary when compared to a webpage server.

The interactions of a user with the webpage server has little effect on other users accessing the same webpage, but so isn’t the case with a gaming server.

For example:

Two random users search for the same product and land on the same ecommerce platform. One of the users ‘A’ buys the product. The other user still sees the page the way it was before ‘A’ bought the product.
An online multiplayer game has 6 players. Player ‘A’ kills ‘B’. All the other players will now see only 4 other players. The interactions of a gaming server with one user thus has an impact on the way other users interact.

Setting up your own dedicated game server hosting

High latency and lag is an issue with public servers which can ruin the experience for serious gamers. With public servers, you only play by the rules that the public finds fit.

The conventional low-end and relatively cheap dedicated servers have always been used as a gaming server. But, the administrators that took gaming-battles on such servers reported that they were not able to obtain the performance they would have had from a high-end gaming server.

Dedicated Gaming Server provides you with a private playground so you enjoy round the clock uninterrupted gaming experience. It allows administrators to decide who plays and who does not. Secondly, it lets you frame your own set of rules for the game.

It is easy to customize the playtime, or to play only on a certain map, or to restrict the allowed weapons for your game.

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