Interview with Summit Servers, Jon Biloh.

***John*** · 01-13-2007, 01:54 AM

When you talk about quality game server you think about high FPS, no overloading, and extreme resources. Well, this brings us to our interviewee by the name of Jon Biloh, the current Vice President of Velocity Servers & Summit Server, INC. Before we begin if anyone has not heard anything about these two companies, please visit their links respectively below.

http://www.velocity-servers.net
http://www.summit-servers.com

Let us begin Jon, how about you give us a little background information on Summit Servers as this is our main focus of this interview.

Gary Stanley, the lead engineer and chief technical officer at Velocity had long awaited a chance to showoff his talent with FreeBSD (Summit operates on a custom build of FreeBSD). Management realized that there was a substantial market at the high end gaming sector. With that known, Gary Stanley and other parts of the VS operational staff set out to establish a company that offers the highest performance game servers possible.

Summit Servers specializes in being one of the top performance gaming servers in the industry, but how? What about your gaming servers make them the top of the heap as opposed to other companies that offer 1000FPS or 100 tic servers?

Since its inception Summit was a performance minded operation. Everything the team worked on had one goal in mind – exceptional performance, period. Summit uses private O/S builds that ensure proper clock consistency – which results in excellent wall timing and hence stable FPS at the highest levels. Of course Summit also makes use of the newest and fastest hardware available.

What type of server specifications are we looking at here? Could you get into detail about owning your own hardware and how that makes a difference in the quality of service customers receive?

Our primary configuration: Quad Opterons paired with 4GB of Ram and 15,000RPM SCSI hard drives, no cost is spared. All machines are fully company owned; allowing us to tweak every aspect of the build, keeping performance and stability our highest priorities. We also maintain a strict eight servers per machine quota; eight servers per machine is roughly 1/3 the industry average for other providers using similar hardware. Clearly that results in superior performance.

Many users are familiar with Velocity Servers; being a former customer myself I understand the quality Velocity offers. Running both this and Summit Servers, do you feel you are offering the same product twice or is there a key difference between them?

The differences between the Velocity and Summit brands are significant. Velocity operates on Windows, while Summit uses our private FreeBSD build. Summit targets gamers with the strictest demands, gamers whom expect their servers to perform at levels just recently made possible. Having both brands allows us to cover the industry and meet needs of all different breeds of gamers.

Jon you personally have been in this industry for many years, what would you say has been the most difficult aspect of being a game server provider and how did you overcome that difficulty?

Easy! ISP’s. Not a day goes by where our networking team isn’t reworking our routing metrics to shuffle traffic away from overloaded ISP/Tier1 trunks. Unfortunately many ISP’s consider it reasonable to allow their networks to become saturated during peak times. Shuffling traffic around these hot spots keeps us busy!

You see so many up and coming game server providers being posted all over the net and IRC. Does the surge in new companies worry you at all? Do you feel that the market will still favor you and your companies?

There is no end to game server providers of which popup overnight and are gone shortly thereafter. Simply, it’s easy to rent a machine and consider yourself a GSP. Velocity / Summit have a large staff, real payroll, extremely talented employees and real ‘round the clock support. We’re confident gamers will recognize these qualities and continue their services with our companies.

Alex is also a big part of Velocity and Summit, how did you two end up partnering up and how did you two start what would become Velocity Servers?

Mr. Vial is our operational manager and has been an integral part of the success of both Velocity and Summit. With an incredible drive, and eye for success he continues to impress not only the clients he deals with, but upper tier management at Velocity. Beyond my professional relationship with the man, he is a true friend and someone I’ve come to have a great respect for.

How many customers are both Velocity and Summit serving and how has this number changed over the years? Has their ever been a moment where sales have been declining to a point of worry?

Velocity continues to be the second largest game server provider in North America, serving thousands of customers. We’re extremely pleased with the position Velocity maintains. We’re constantly working to improve our offerings through network, hardware and other infrastructure changes – upgrades which have paid dividends!

Summit is not intended to have the client base Velocity handles. Summit offers services to a niche group and therefore is a much smaller operation.

In my honest opinion I feel that your biggest competition has come from Hi-Definition Gaming. How has this battle for the top spot in the gaming community hurt your business and do you feel they are still competition?

We consider all providers competition. They provide motivation for improving our offerings which translates into additional customers for Velocity and Summit. Competition is rarely a bad thing!

Your support has been one of the most promising features that Velocity and Summit both offer, however with Summit becoming more and more popular do you feel that your support is being stretched thin? Will customers see any drop in response times?

We don’t expect, nor will we allow any degradation in support quality as a result of expansion. If the need arises we have plans in place for the addition of extra support technicians. We’ve also begun working on a brand new support system, which will allow clients to solve many of their own issues. We’ve yet to disclose additional details; however our clients can expect to hear about the new support system very soon!

I would like to thank you for your time. Finally, our last question would be a big one for a lot of individuals looking to start their own Game Server Company. What is the single most important piece of advice you can give to these new companies?

Don’t. There is little space and even less profit margin for new startup companies. Like any other industry, GSP’s work off an economy of scale. We’re able to stay profitable and successful through using our purchasing power to our advantage. Small GSP’s aren’t able to do this, which is a primary reason why you see so many come and go, quicker than the wind.

I would like to thank Jon for his time and I am sure this information has been helpful to some people. You can expect more interviews from GSPTruth.com in the coming months. Thanks everyone!

Would you like me to interview you, your company, or organization? Please email us at interviews@gsptruth.com.