DBMHosting

I spoke to the founder of DBMHosting and asked him to fill out our new host questionnaire so that we can show them off to the world. These are the answers he was kind enough to give us:

When did you form your game hosting company and why?

DBMHosting was formed June 2014. During the months upcoming to its formation myself and my school mates decided it would be a fun project to start a hosting company. After thoroughly experimenting and testing we got our environment up and running and ready to launch.

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

I’ve wanted to start a hosting company years before it actually happened. I gained this interest from playing a lot of online games during childhood, even building my own servers by using hosts. In the year of the company’s formation I was studying for IT system administration. It was here that I found a few like minded friends who had the same aspirations.

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

The most important thing I’ve learned during my time as a GSP is how to correctly manage servers. With the help of my study I was able to get an internship at a growing ISP, for which I am still freelancing for on occasion. My duties included but not limited to Datacenter maintenance, WISP Infrastructure design & management and the installation of new customers.

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

DBMHosting is currently working on building new infrastructure from scratch to provide an easier to use system for beginners whilst remaining a powerful tool for experts and networks. We are also investigating the possibilities of introducing some form of High Availability for gameservers. My hope is that we can provide these services and more in the upcoming years.

What has been your main game?

Our main game is currently Minecraft. Most of our efforts are put into this game. We have specialised for games requiring high performance on single cores. To date we are one of a few hosts that use the I7-7700K, currently ranking Nr.4 in best single core performer on the market.

How do you handle support in difficult situations?

During difficult situations we aim to keep our clients as informed as possible. We have also mitigated a lot of risks due to my building experience with the host, my finished IT study, and ongoing university study.

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

As a company I have kickstarted one game, ECO Global Survival. It is similar to Minecraft but interested me due to its introduction of ‘real world’ consequences. Seeing it’s ongoing development to date I believe it has great potential.

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

Recently we experienced some weird networking artefacts. At times, players would barely have a connection, and at others it would be rock solid. This went on for a few days without us being able to find the cause. Actively monitoring our network infrastructure and servers, combined with the collaboration of us, our datacenter and DDoS mitigation provider. We were able to narrow the issue down to the connection between our servers and DDoS mitigation provider. After re-routing our traffic through the datacenter’s nation-wide redundant network we were able to find that the issue was a dirty fibre optic connection at one of its Points of Presence.

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

We have sponsored a few Twitch streamers and youtubers in the past, however none match the partnership we have currently with Gamster.org, a Romanian network for Minecraft players. This network reaches ~1500 – 2000 players during peak times daily, and we thank them for their continued support.

Do you offer any services that are rare or unique to yourselves?

We always attempt to include some free ‘bonus’ services aside from the standard trials. It is hard to list these as every customer is unique. I can however make a list of some of the actions we have performed in the past; The creation of a modpack for a twitch streamer, A custom network infrastructure to load-balance Gamster.org’s massive load of players, The migration of a server from one host to us.

During our support we always aim to provide the client with directions on how he can reach his goals himself (ie: Installing a modpack, installing a website). Whilst we are willing to do this for him, we believe that teaching our clients on how to manage their servers can be a very valuable lesson.