The Growing Importance of Bare Metal Servers in the Evolving Gaming Industry

TL; DR: Our expectations around gaming have shifted. Now, a game without lag isn’t just nice to have — it’s expected. i3D.net is a game server provider that guarantees low latency, no matter how many thousands of players are online. We spoke with i3D.net’s Chief Commercial Officer, Jeroen de Koning, about how the company tackles the reliability issues faced by gamers, developers, and service providers.

If you think about it, losing your internet connection during a game is not unlike experiencing the stages of grief.

First, there’s denial. You check the connection, hoping it’s just a glitch. Then comes anger, and you feel like the network is intentionally targeting you. Next, you start bargaining, toggling between “on” and “off,” hoping for a magical reconnection.

But it doesn’t take long for the sad realization to hit: By default, you lost your match. Feeling defeated, you accept your fate and get up to restart the router, hoping that this, at least, will do the trick.

If this has happened to you, you’re not alone.

A few years ago, Fortnite’s servers experienced an unexpected outage that lasted about seven hours.

(This was during winter break for most children in the U.S., so it’s safe to say this outage probably spoiled the day for thousands of players.)

That’s the kind of issue that the game hosting provider i3D.net wants to prevent its users from ever having to experience again. As a leader in the gaming space that delivers fast internet connections, i3D.net specializes in the niche market in which low latency and uninterrupted gameplay meet.

When you’re playing live with others, you have to think on your feet. It’s just as fast-paced as real life where every millisecond counts.

“The way we build our infrastructure is dedicated to supporting the growth of the video games industry and how to manage live service games that are constantly evolving,” explained Jeroen de Koning, Chief Commercial Officer of i3D.net, citing games such as Fortnite, Call of Duty, and FIFA.

With more than 60 data centers across six continents and direct connections to 9,000 ASNs (autonomous system numbers), i3D.net works to guarantee that its gaming servers are never second-best.

Did you know 60% of game playtime was spent on online games older than six years old?

Despite the thousands of new games released each year, most people apparently prefer to stick to the familiar ones — with games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto 5, Minecraft, Counter-Strike 2, Rocket League, and Apex Legends on the roster.

You could credit the games’ storytelling, graphics, or character abilities, but I think it has a lot more to do with dependability. For example, my husband loves to play Apex Legends but constantly threatens to quit if its lag times don’t get fixed soon.

Jeroen emphasized a big issue legacy games have: Keeping players coming back is getting more challenging, especially with the growing popularity of free-to-play games.

“If your game isn’t a 9 out of 10 in terms of player experience, people will quickly switch to something else,” he added.

No developer wants slow servers to be the reason their game fails. In this competitive market, where user experience is the priority, laggy servers will obviously drive players away.

With this in mind, i3D.net is dedicated to reducing lag altogether for its customers.

Case in point: Check out this video below, where Massive Entertainment talks about The Division 2’s hosting infrastructure and how i3D.net assisted in the launch.

Also, check out i3D.net’s other customer cases, including Alta, which saw 30% lower infrastructure costs, and Starsiege: Deadzone, which experienced a 30 to 50-millisecond improvement in latency.

Latency, or the delay in data transmission, is somewhat interchangeable with the term “lag.” That’s the word you’re more likely to hear in online games. While the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are some noticeable differences:

• Latency is the technical term for the delay in data transmissions over a network. It’s measured in milliseconds (ms) and represents the time it takes for information to travel from the player to the server and then back to the player (player-server-player).
• Lag: Lag is the noticeable delay that most players have experienced before. It happens when high latency, jitter, or packet loss occurs and can manifest as delayed responses, stuttering, or freezing in the game.

Imagine you’re playing Call of Duty, lining up a shot, when suddenly your game freezes for a moment. That second of lag allows the other player to move out of your line of sight, so when the game catches up, you’re left shooting at nothing with only seconds left on the clock.

In the words of my frustrated husband: What’s the point in paying for a game that doesn’t work how it’s supposed to?

The solution is more reliable servers and a very reliable network connection allowing the servers to communicate efficiently with the players.

Servers are a type of computer that is designed to provide resources, services, or information to other computers over a network. It’s like having your own private part of the internet. Think of servers as the backbone of computing hosting services: They provide the essential hardware and infrastructure needed to store and process data for its users.

“What sets us apart is the additional services we offer on top of our basic computing hosting services,” said Jeroen. “Instead of just relying on the latest CPUs or GPUs, we are adding value to certain markets with real-time applications.”

As developers look to provide the best possible player experience, bare metal servers have become more important in the gaming industry.

i3D.net is aware of the competition from public cloud providers, like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, which are often the go-to choices for many game developers. But Jeroen pointed out that devs are moving toward bare metal servers because the pricing is more transparent and they consistently deliver better performance.

But Jeroen said i3D.net remains optimistic.

“I think a lot of companies are seeing player experience as key, and if they can’t provide the best player experience on these games, they’re going to look for alternatives,” he added.

Discord, Massive Entertainment, and Psyonix have trusted i3D.net to create a stable, high-performance connection. Part of this success is thanks to bare metal servers for gaming.

If you’re not familiar, here’s a quick definition: A bare metal server is a physical server dedicated entirely to one user. This means you get the best performance and customization because the server isn’t shared with anyone else. Cloud servers are nothing else, but the same bare metal servers with virtualization software sitting on top of it, which cuts the physical server in to multiple virtual ones. Users of virtual cloud servers share physical resources of the server, where the virtualization software eats up a part of the resources in order to cut the physical machine up in to smaller virtual servers, making it less performant than single-tenant bare metal servers.

Here’s what you get:

• A network built for gaming, cutting down on latency on every corner
• 60+ data centers around the world, positioning game servers closer to the end users for the lowest latency
• Fast network with 23+ Tbps, which handles huge amounts of transmitted data every second
• Direct connections with 9,000+ networks, allowing the exchange of gameplay data more efficiently between players and servers

“We’re always excited about new CPUs and GPUs and how we can leverage them,” said Jeroen. “But with everything becoming more expensive, there’s renewed interest in bare metal, with a move away from hyperscale clouds.”

Hyperscale clouds are designed to scale up and down depending on resource demand. They’re typically used for large-scale workloads, like big data analytics. Bare metal servers, on the other hand, are more dependable for high-performance computing, like gaming.

But just in case there are game spikes, i3D.net also supports a hybrid approach to hosting where they’ll automatically switch to the cloud to balance any sudden high activity.

As cheating in games has become more sophisticated, i3D.net developed server-based anti-cheat solutions.

“We analyze a lot of data from within the game to determine if someone is cheating,” Jeroen explained. “Unlike traditional anti-cheat software installed on a computer, which looks for anomalies in the software, our approach examines what’s happening in the game itself as it happens.”

For example, if a player racks up 10 kills in Call of Duty within a minute using a weapon that should only fire two bullets a minute, i3D.net’s system will flag it as abnormal.

Threats like these are becoming all too common in live games, so this server-based anti-cheat solution is one of many i3D.net created.

Another is the purposely built game anti-DDoS system, GLAD (Global Low-Latency Anti-DDoS). Its system uses black, white, and gray lists based on player IPs and matchmaking services to ensure that only verified players can access the game.

In addition to these security measures, there’s also a lot to be excited about in the market.

Jeroen specifically noted the rise of middleware providers in the video game industry. Like i3D.net, middleware providers support software that helps different applications and services work together.

Jeroen pointed out that smaller teams often struggle with this because they lack the time, resources, or expertise.

He explained, “Having an IT team of just five people on call 24/7 makes it really difficult to manage different vendors and ensure that all their systems and APIs work seamlessly with your back-end system.”

That’s why a new wave of middleware providers is emerging.

And, of course, i3D.net is one of them. In fact, it was recently highlighted in an Omdia report as one of the few game server providers who are successfully competing with the industry’s leading giants.

“It’s an exciting time to be in the industry,” Jeroen said.

Whether you’re a gamer or developer, i3D.net is an incredibly dependable solution that’s also trusted by some of the biggest names in the gaming world. Check it out for yourself today.