LOW.MS

The founder of LOW.MS, Johnathan, has been kind enough to supply the answers to a questionnaire we have created. The purpose of the questionnaire is for the visitors of CompareGameHosting to get to know the hosting companies better. We chose the top 10 questions we believed our visitors wanted to know the answers too, here they are:

When did you form your game hosting company and why?

LOW.MS was founded during the summer of 2016 by myself, Jonathan. Having previously run a Minecraft hosting company during 2011-2013 (which was later acquired), running a hosting company is something I missed ever since and was always at the back of my mind. Launching a new one was inevitable. This time round however, I wanted to provide hosting for all games, even the smallest of indie games – rather than just Minecraft.

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

As mentioned before, I ran a Minecraft hosting company for 3 years. It was very highly rated and popular at the time, and provided myself with a wealth of knowledge about the game server hosting industry, and hosting industry in general. Before that, I have always been interested in hosting and managing game servers games, whether it be for past gaming communities or a few friends.

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

Balancing resources for customer service, performance, up-time and pricing is very hard. It’s easy to put all your resources into performance, set your prices low, but then you will struggle to provide a top level of support. The lesson learnt here is that you can’t simply undercut everyone in the market, and still provide top-tier server performance, customer service and maintain a flawless network.

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

LOW.MS has some very exciting new projects on the horizon. We are in the middle of building our own custom control panel, which will absolutely blow all our competitors out of the water in terms of features, speed, design and usability. We are also looking to provide an array of tools for eSports server hosting, catering for tournaments, teams, PUG services and more. We are looking to innovate and bring game server hosting into the future!

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

We are very much a jack of all trades. We got a lot of attention during the release of Conan Exiles, and subsequently created a few unique tools such as a way to manage the server’s database. We also have mod tools which are geared towards specific games such as ARK (Steam Workshop installer). Apart from that, we generally treat all games evenly, and produce features which work across all games.

How do you handle support in difficult situations?

Anything that causes downtime will always be a top priority, whether a developer completely changes the game, a new update causes some issues or we have a (very rare) network outage, we use our industry experience and problem solving skills to provide alternative solutions promptly – all while communicating with our customers and being as transparent as possible.

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

We hope that Stationeers will pick up some more, it’s very much early access at the moment but has huge potential. Ideally it will follow the same trend as Factorio, which was once not very well known. I recommend playing both if you haven’t already!

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

We mentioned briefly earlier about our Conan Exiles database management tool. This was originally a request from a customer, and we initially thought it would be nearly impossible to implement. Rather than simply telling the customer we do not support it, we went above and beyond and spent weeks learning how Conan Exiles saves world and player data, and producing a set of tools which mimic this.

It allowed our customers to do things like clear up old items and structures in their world, export a list of all players, and much more. It was a big winner and was well worth the effort!

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

We don’t currently sponsor any Twitch/YouTube channels. We do sponsor some UK University eSports societies, and we did sponsor a CS:GO tournament and team. However, we are very much waiting to release our new control panel and eSports tools before perusing any further sponsorships.

Do you offer your customers any free additional services or go further than your competition in any way?

We provide mod installation for almost all games. We also provide free SSD web hosting. Our new control panel will include free cloud backups, and a few more features which I can’t mention now, but are not currently available with any other hosts.

Is there anything else you would like to add to your interview that wasn’t asked above?

I thought I’d mention our hardware which we have recently invested a large amount of resources into. Our racks in London are entirely made-up of servers containing brand-new hardware. We use the best CPUs in the industry for game server hosting (Intel i7 7700k) with NVME SSD drives and top-spec DDR4 memory. We are also experimenting with AMD Ryzen, and the new Intel i7 8700k. We are starting to also take ownership of servers throughout the US.