Gamers and clans will be constantly looking for better game server providers. How do we look for quality? By looking at a number of points like support, price, ping and the server hardware used. Cost Price is only relative to what you get from a company. If you choose to pay peanuts expect to get that back in quality. This does not mean that some cheap hosts are not good reputable companies but there is a large majority that are not. If you pay more you should get more but this is not always the case. Some will give you more - but do you need it? Support No one likes thing to break and I for one sure don't! When things do break we like the reassurance that assistance is on hand. When it comes to support you want a swift response and for that response to come when you are wanting it. If your server ends up with a hardware issue then avoid companies who use middle men. Quite often you find companies rent their dedicated servers from another company, who have resold them, who have rented them from a rack space provider, who rents their racks from a data centre. What is a simple problem can quite often become a real mess. Renting from companies who rent directly from the datacentre is always easier and quicker. Business hours are not great for gaming. Yes 9 -5 is great for business, but not for gamers, they want afternoons evenings and weekends. As otherwise you are sat waiting for the next working day to get your issue looked at and possibly fixed. for help with your Counter Strike Source Server. Server Hardware Single core processors may well of done the job fine five years ago not now. Now you want dual cores minimum and really quads with 4gb of RAM to get a stable server as otherwise lag will plague your game. Though don't think a company is loading their Call of Duty 4 hosting relative to what they can take. To keep costs down budget providers will over sell and overload servers.Therefore test a server in the day and if it's fine then you have made a good choice. Do some home work and ask the host for a test server or test IP but find out the IP range they have and look it up on game monitor and choose some servers yourself to test. Network We all want negative pings but it will never happen but the lower the better. Companies all go on about each game server on a 100mbit or 1gbit port etc. This is not the important number. It's what the link between their core switch to their upstream transit provider is. This is because the server might be able communicate with the other servers they host quickly but if they only have a 10mbit connection to the internet it may be a little slow. Feedback Always check out the testimonials a company has, but also what is not on their website or forums as this can make for interesting reading. Some companies like to be open about testimonials and will leave bad feedback on their forums as they are only human at the end of the day.