I am looking to purchase a deathmatch server and I want to know which one is the fastest and best. It doesnt matter how much it costs, who out there offers the fastest servers? Ones that download levels at your full broadband level like downloading from snark pit, instead of loading maps at 1kb/s per user.

<span style="color: white;">Fast downloads are handled through web (http) servers, not game servers. Even with the best servers in the business the downloads would still be slow, since the bandwidth used for map downloads is limited by the server program. Plus, premium bandwidth (what you would get on an expensive server) costs a lot more than generic bandwidth, and for downloading files there's not much difference unless it's in high demand. The download speed would probably be the same even if you did have fast http downloads on the same box as your game server, instead of on a moderately-priced web host.

Now, in order to give you the names of some good server hosts, I'd/we'd need to know around where you live, since locale has a lot to do with good pings and such. One I would NOT suggest is Art of War Central, at least not a Dallas server, mine had terrible performance. Their support is fairly poor too, in my experience. If you're in the southwest US, you might want to give EscapedTurkey a serious look, they have servers in Dallas, TX only right now, but may offer Chicago servers soon. The servers have good performance, and you get the more control over your server than any other host, without a doubt.
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I am looking for a server that includes a web (http) server

I am not sure on the location, USA or Europe, but not Austrailier, I have a T1.5 connection so my computer could handle administrating a US server (I am in england).

I was advised to look into http://www.gameservernetwork.com/, are they any good?

Our server here at the snarkpit is run by 4u-servers, which seem fairly
decent from what I can gather. Hopefully Gwil will notice this thread
and give you the low-down, as he was the one who bought it and will no
doubt be able to give you a more educated opinion of them :smile:

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

Your connection speed has nothing to do with it, its the time it takes for packets to travel between you and the server. If the server is in the US and youre in the UK, its unlikely youll get a ping below 100.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Yeah, if you're aiming to play on the server yourself i'd avoid getting
a server so far away. Prices may be favourable but the performance will
be shoddy at best.

4u have served us well on the Snarkpit, and I play on a lot of
clanservers (DoD Source) from the same company and they're always
steady - even with up to 24 players you get minimal choke or overload.

I'd say your best bet is to try out some brands in the server list
(quite a lot of companies put their name on privately owned servers)
and make a decision based on that.

Hmm, I will take a look, I have noticed that some servers dont let you download levels very fast.
For example, if I download a level on the snark pit that takes 10 seconds to download (save file as), if I tried to download that same map from a server it would take up to 5 minutes, they seem to limit each player to only a small amount of bandwidth to download the map. I want one of those 'fast downloads' servers that let you download levels at your normal internet speed instead of limited bandwidth.

You need some external webspace to do that, and you then setup your
game server so that when people need to download things they do so
automatically from that webspace. We could do that with the snarkpit
server for example, but haven't gotten around to it.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

In the terms of 'slots' for the game server, I want one that will be online 24/7 not on different times. Know any provider that offers this?

errr, when people say "slots" they mean how many players you can have
on - eg, 12, 14, 16 etc.. if you pay for a gameserver, it will be
available 24/7 and fully controllable all the time.

Oh x_x thats my second stupid mistake today, lol thanks.