Web Hosting for Arcade Sites

By Web Hosting on Nov 15, 2007 in Hostgator Blog, Technology, Web Hosting

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Web Hosting for Arcade Sites

One of the fastest growing industries today is the online entertainment industry. A good-sized chunk of that industry is related to casual gaming which in turn boils down to online arcade sites. These sites are easy to create, take very little work to maintain and can be very profitable if done correctly. However, often, many of these sites go down because of excessive resource usage or because they are exceeding the bandwidth limit on their hosting server. In this article we will look at the hosting requirements of arcade sites as well as the most popular scripts that are used to run arcade sites.

Arcade sites generally need three types of resources to run well: CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. The first two only apply if you are using a database-driven script to run your arcade site. However, since there are very few, if any, arcade sites that are just static HTML pages so CPU and RAM can be considered mandatory requirements. Generally a popular arcade site will have many features that require database queries. If we break it down, an arcade site usually needs 1-2 queries to capture the login session and determine if the visitor is a guest or not. In addition, on the homepage, there usually is 2 or more queries to display the newest added games and randomly selected games from each category(action, arcade, puzzle,etc). Most arcades almost display the most popular games and the highest rated games for the week. This adds another 1-2 queries for the script to perform. On the individual game pages there also needs to be a query to get the game contents and 1-2 more queries for the rating of the game. On each page on average there will be anywhere from 4-6 SQL queries needed to perform the basic functions. This may not seem like a lot but if the arcade site is popular and there are hundreds of people on at the same time, it will generate hundreds or thousands of queries per minute. Using features like caching in the script will help but will not solve the problem entirely. For this reason, you need to find a hosting service that is very lenient with CPU,RAM, and MYSQL database usage. In the Terms of Service agreement of many web hosting companies, there is often a clause that only allows a specific number of MYSQL connections at any one certain time. Usually this number is set at somewhere between 15-30 simultaneous MYQL connections at a time, which is decent to run a small arcade site, but not nearly enough to run a large arcade site. Many people on forums have told me what a great deal 1&1 has or Powweb has for hosting because of the prices and the space/bandwidth you get for the price only to come back to me a month later saying that these services suspended their account for over-usage when they had not nearly reached the space/bandwidth limit. Usually I have to explain to them what “overages” the host is talking about. None of these people read the Terms of Service agreement and many are new to web hosting and do not understand the separate allocation of server resources such as RAM and CPU. A shared hosting company is a decent way to start an arcade site, but if your traffic picks up, RAM and CPU usage will get in the way of expansion.

Besides RAM and CPU usage, the other concern with arcade sites is bandwidth usage. Many arcade sites get around this by just framing or putting links to other people’s game pages. I personally do not think this is a good idea as the user will likely leave your page when clicking on one of these links to get to the content. The best way to keep visitors is to host the games yourself. However, flash files today are big, often ranging in the several megabytes per flash game range, and will therefore use a lot of bandwidth. If the average flash game is 1mb in size and you get 40,000 page views daily on average, you are looking at over 1 TB of bandwidth per month. Arcade sites are one of the few genres of sites where bandwidth usage can get to be an issue which makes finding the right hosting solution doubly hard because most hosts that are relaxed on CPU and RAM usage do not give that much bandwidth and the hosts that do give huge quantities of bandwidth are the ones with tight restrictions on CPU/RAM usage. A good balance is to find a more expensive provider that offers a fair amount of bandwidth(Say 1-1.5TB instead of 5TB like some of the major oversellers do) and have platforms that are specially optimized for hosting application-driven sites like arcade sites. Two such hosting companies that I could recommend with this kind of service would be mediatemple.com and Downtownhost.com. Both these providers give great customer support and have high ratings and good reviews on www.webhostingtalk.com.

However, if your arcade site is constantly getting over 50,000 page views a day, it is time to move off of shared hosting and look for a dedicated server. This arcade site located at http://www.flashninjaclan.com , runs off of a dedicated server running a dual-score AMD processor, 1GB RAM, 80GB harddrive, unlimited upload bandwidth, and 2TB download bandwidth. I pay roughly $225/month for this solution and couldn’t be happier with the reliability, speed, and support I’ve gotten from my provider. There are many places that offer managed dedicated servers with 2TB bandwidth, 1GB DDR RAM, and dual-core processors for around $250/month. Some places that come to mind are liquidweb.com, gate2vn.net, and wiredtree.com. If you must have the shortest response times possible, you might want to look at Rackspace as well but their hosting solutions are usually more than 3 times the price of the ones mentioned above for the same server specs and bandwidth. A typical Rackspace offer on a entry level AMD server with 512MB RAM and 150GB bandwidth would be $350 whereas you could get his server elsewhere for $100 a month with semi-management. Once you are on a dedicated box, you never have to worry about being suspended for CPU/RAM overage issues. However, this does not mean you never have to worry about those issues again. Even though you are the only one on the server, if your site gets enough hits, it will use up on your CPU and bandwidth resources, slow your site to a crawl and even possibly crash and reboot your server. If you reach this stage, you should consider upgrading the CPU and the RAM. On a dedicated, it is very likely that you will run short on bandwidth before you run out of CPU/RAM resources. Since bandwidth for most dedicated servers isn’t any greater than many of the shared hosting plans and CPU/RAM limits are maybe 20-50 times greater or more, it is very likely that bandwidth, even at 2TB will be your limiting factor. Watch your bandwidth usage day-by-day and if it seems that you will be going over the limit, immediately make arrangements to buy more in bulk from your host instead of paying expensive bandwidth overage charges. For an idea of how much bandwidth costs, usually a 10mps(about 3.2 TB month) dedicated pipe costs around $300 and an 100mps(32TB/month) pipe costs around $3000/month. At the cheapest providers you can get the bandwidth for about 1/3 of those prices although most of these providers are unmanaged. If you do not mind going with budget bandwidth only, you can probably negotiate prices down to about $200 for an 10mps pipe and $2000 for an 100mps pipe from a semi-managed or fully managed provider. If your site gets popular like arcadetown.com or addictinggames.com, you will probably need more than one server to run everything and will have to look into getting a clustered solution. Most managed dedicated companies can provide you with this but for further expert management, you may also want to look to an outside consulting company such as Platinum Server Management located at http://www.platinumservermanagement.com/ . Getting the adequate server management you need will guarantee maximum uptime and profitability for your arcade.

Now that we have looked at hosting solutions and management for arcade sites, lets look at some of the popular scripts used to run arcade sites.

1. http://www.flashgamescript.com/ - Flash game script may be one of the best scripts out there for features and the ability to customize the look and feel of the script. It also has many revenue options for the webmasters by having selectable featured games, random games, latest games, most popular games and more. It also has options for individual page sponsors, advertisement manager, affiliate programs, and even an integrated Paypal system for payment processing. It also has features to keep users coming back such as member statistics, profiles, top rated players, and other features. The pricing on this script is pretty expensive as the package with 2100 games and 480 movies comes at a whopping $320. If you have the money, this is probably the best script to buy, but if you, like the rest of us, do not have infinite amounts of cash to start an arcade site, then look to the other options below.
2. Advanced arcade script (http://www.entertainmentscripts.com/) - I personally use this script at http://www.java-gaming.com and its pretty good. It has the most basic features such as a member system, user ratings, and user comments. However, the core code of the script is encoded so writing modifications for it is quite difficult. People also have trouble with the templating of this script because there are no real instructions, the template system is a bit confusing, and support from the developers can be rated as little to non-existent when it comes to extra features. Still, I’ve been mostly satisfied with it because I have been successfully able to add new pages, modify stuff on existing ones, and slightly tweak the features. This script is not as good as flashgamesitescript because it does not offer customizable featured games, highest rated games, and other such options and you will need to have pretty decent skill in PHP programming to add these in yourself. There are easy ways to add in advertisements and the ability for individual page sponsors so streams of revenue should not be a huge problem with this script. Pricing wise, it is pretty good bang for the buck with over 2100+ games coming with the initial package for around $40(when I bought it).
3. Shock Arcade(http://www.shockarcade.com) - Shock arcade was one of the first scripts I was introduced to but certainly not my favorite. I didn’t like the default template(which is the one most people end up using) as much as the other scripts and the layout did not seem as organized as the layout for the other scripts. It does have the basic add game features and allows you to upload games, embed games, or frame other game pages so adding content is easy. It also has a top referrers system to bring in traffic and a templating system for you to customize the look and feel of the script. I can’t quite recommend this script because it does not seem to be as well developed as other scripts and does not quite match up in terms of features. I’m not certain about the pricing on this script either, but I believe the basic package is in the $30-$40 range.
4. Your own script - If you know PHP, this is by far the best option. The problem with the scripts above is that some of them are encoded and you cannot really customize them that well. If is also hard to integrate other people’s scripts with popular forums. Writing your own system takes time but since you know just how it works, you can integrate it with just about anything. For my main site http://www.flashninjaclan.com, this is the path I went. The script is tightly integrated with the forum and features highest rated flash, latest cartoons and games, and a membership and commenting system that is tightly knit with a forum system that I also happened to write myself. For reasons of expansion and adding even more features down the line, writing my own script was by far the best way to go. Most of the popular arcade sites have also taken this approach.

In this article we have looked at the hosting requirements for arcade sites as well as many script solutions for running an arcade. Studying this information and analyzing it carefully will get you a good start on your way to running a popular arcade site.

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