DatHost

DatHost are an eSports focused game hosting company with a good few years of experience under their belt. They have a wide range of game servers available to their customers and offer a whole bunch of services that see them go above and beyond for their customer.

We asked them to complete our hosts questionnaire so we can show you what they are like aside from just statistics. Here is how Markus from DatHost answered our questions:

When did you form your game hosting company and why?

We formed DatHost in 2012 as we saw that all GSPs pretty much had the same model with monthly commitment and exact same outdated control panels.

We wanted to change that. If you only need a server for playing with your buddies on a Friday once a month you shouldn’t need to pay a full monthly price for that server, you should only be paying for the time you actually use the server.

And that’s why our biggest feature right from the start were our pay-as-you-go model which still today is a very appreciated feature.

Another huge difference between us and the others is the ease-of-use in our system. Our system is custom-built from the ground up (99% of providers use the same 2-3 different pre-built and outdated control panels).

We wanted to eliminate the need for any hard-earned pre-existing knowledge of hosting game servers and make hosting as simple as possible.

We do that for example with pre-built configurations for popular server types, one-click installers for most popular mods & plugins as well as a intuitive and helpful, modern UI.

What experience of game hosting did you have before you formed your GSP?

We all had run a lot of community servers in the past just for fun, that makes us very experienced in how to host a good game server and also voice-servers.

What have been the most important lessons you have learnt during your time as a GSP?

DDoS. When you run a GSP you will always have to handle large amount of DDoS-attacks. We have carefully designed our infrastructure to be able to handle large attacks without any impact for our customers.

Where do you see your GSP in 3 years time? What does the future hold for your company?

Our focus right now is to expand our coverage, we want to have a lot more locations available to keep the ping-times as low as possible for our customers.

We are also always looking for new exiting upcoming games that people would like to run on dedicated servers, we hope to be able to offer a lot more games in the future.

What has been your main game? Have you maybe focused on one game and specialised in hosting it?

Our main game has been CS:GO, we offer one-click plugin installation from our control-panel, drag-and-drop of your own config files, full bot and sourcemod-support directly in our control panel.

You can also use your own workshop map list, upload/edit all the server files through both the web-GUI or via FTP and we also offer a range of free tools for CS:GO at http://tools.dathost.net that is highly appreciated by the community.

How do you handle support in difficult situations?

We are constantly monitoring dev-mailing lists, forums and news from all the games and mods we support to pick up game changes as soon as possible to be able to handle changes that we need to address.

What Early Access or young games do you see taking off in the near future?

We have a lot of faith in Battalion 1944 which we have offered from day 1 as the server-files where available. We really like this game a lot and hopes it really takes off as great competitive FPS game!

Has there been a situation where you have had to deal with a difficult request and how did you respond to it?

We recently had a customer contact us regarding connection issues that were very strange. At first we could not reproduce the issue but after some extensive testing we found that the customer hit a very specific edge case that only appeared for a handful of customers.

In the end we actually redesigned a few core parts of our network structure to completely fix this problem and rewarded the customer with some free credits as a thanks for the help with the troubleshooting.

Do you sponsor any Twitch/YouTube channels and if so would you like to give them a shout out?

No we do not currently sponsor any Twitch or Youtube channels.

Anything else you would like to add DatHost?

We believe that pricing should be transparent and fair. Therefore everything is included in our standard price, we don’t charge for any extra services that users almost always require anyway, such as better CPU, de-branding the server, making the server public/private or for things like SQL / FastDL.

In addition to that we also have a free trial option with our servers that is very unique.

The first time you register an account with us you get to start with 1 free credit which gives you a chance to setup any game server with us and play on it for a few hours to be sure that you are fully satisfied with it before you pay us any money at all!

This is a feature you will not find with any other provider!