Being a pioneer is important to any business; taking risks and having them pay off and can separate the big boys from all the rest. Nuclear Fallout can be considered one of those pioneers. When it came time to take performance servers to a new level, they answered the call with their 2000 FPS servers, or did they? In this interview with John of NFO, we will get an in-depth look into the past, present, and future of this fine company.
Want to learn more about Nuclear Fallout Servers? Please visit
www.nfoservers.com
John, first I would like to take the time to thank you for speaking with me. First off I would like to ask for a little background information on both NFO and yourself. For instance, its start and what lead you to become a part of this organization.
I’m glad to have this opportunity. I love to talk shop.
I founded the Nuclearfallout gaming community in early 2001 with a couple of guys from an old Counter-Strike clan that had disbanded. As the gaming community grew in popularity, we got more and more calls from clans wanting us to run servers for them. We did run a few, but the real expansion didn’t come until Tom, a community member, stepped in and helped out with some serious server hardware. After I wrote the first version of our control panel in April 2002, Tom and I formed the actual business (Nuclearfallout Enterprises) and purchased significantly more hardware so we could start renting servers out.
From there we grew exponentially. In 2003, we took the next major step and incorporated, right before I was activated by the Army Reserve as part of “Operation Enduring Freedom”. We continued to grow while I was active, and after I came back in 2004 we started seriously rolling out new features and locations, hiring more support staffers, and becoming the company we are today.
According to your web site, you offer premium servers at low costs. How do you find that balance to offer cost-effective services but at the same time maintain a profitable business? Do you find it difficult at times?
I should start off by saying that we don’t actually run a profit – that’s because most of the revenue we bring in goes towards our regular monthly costs, and the rest goes towards new hardware and growing the business. We don’t mind that.
We keep prices down not just by a tight belt and reinvestment but also through various efficiencies. Our size allows us to obtain excellent cost efficiencies on our bandwidth, collocation costs and hardware (which we save money on by building our own machines), for instance. Also, the automated systems we use to monitor our network and create and destroy servers for us (among many other tasks) greatly decrease our support burden, allowing us to concentrate support resources on better overall service. In the same vein, our website and control panel allow customers to do all sorts of things without even needing to contact us, which helps out both parties.
Premium can be a very strong word, and I am sure you use it with pride when describing your services. However, what type of specifications are we looking at on your collocated equipment? What makes your hardware better than the next “Joe’s Game Servers”?
I don’t want to give an exact set of specifications because I know it would quickly go out of date, but when we buy new machines, we always buy right near the top of the line and customize them specifically for the needs of game servers. This costs us a bit more up front, but in the long run it pays off, and it also allows us to go far above and beyond what most dedicated server providers offer (and most smaller competitors use leased dedicated servers).
That said, hardware actually isn’t as important as it used to be in this business. Newer processors have more cores than they did a couple of years ago, but each core is not actually all that much faster – and because game servers are generally single-threaded, core speed is what’s most important. With more cores, the OS can do some additional internal load-balancing and we can have additional overhead on each machine to compensate for usage spikes, but there’s a diminishing return on it.
So you decided to go with INTERNAP as your primary bandwidth provider. Was this an easy decision or did you go through tough research to make the best choice for your current/potential customers? Have you ever considered other providers?
For us, finding the fastest and most reliable bandwidth provider has mostly been a trial-and-error process over the years. We started off reading reviews, but in 2002 not too many people ran game servers and there really weren’t many reviews out there that applied to us. After a false-start on another provider in Seattle, we quickly moved to InterNAP there based on the few reviews we
could find, and stuck with it. When we expanded to LA, we searched for a more cost-effective solution and tested many single-NSP transit providers, including UUnet, Level3, and Verio, and while some of them performed pretty well, all had their problems to certain clients. After a bad experience with a reseller of Level3 in 2004 or 2005, we eventually moved all of our equipment in LA to InterNAP and were so pleased with the result that we have used InterNAP for most of our other expansions as well.
In the last couple of years, we have leveraged our routers and BGP knowledge to add other providers to the mix in LA and in Seattle and have connected to numerous local ISPs through the SIX (Seattle Internet Exchange) in Seattle as well. This has given us additional knobs to turn to improve the quality of our bandwidth even further.
Being a former customer of NFO, I know for a fact you have a very nice control panel that makes running a game server very easy. How was the process of developing this custom system and if I may, who is your coder? Do you have plans to enhance it’s capabilities in the future?
I originally ground out the control panel in about a week’s worth of time in 2002. That first code is still the basis of what we run now, but it has been frequently reworked over the years. I’d say that overall I’ve put hundreds or thousands of hours into it – it’s tough to say exactly how much because it’s so tightly integrated with our website and other systems.
Absolutely we plan to continue enhancing the control panel. In between all the other things I do, I am continually making small improvements to it and fixing any bugs that crop up, and every few months I try to push out a more major upgrade. For instance, just recently I developed a fresh set of account pages centered around a new direct payment system.
I remember what attracted me to your services in my early Counter-Strike days was the 2000 FPS server offer. You do not see many, if any, offering such FPS on their servers. What type of customizations or changes did you have to make to your servers to achieve this? Also, your detractors would suggest it sees no real performance gain and is more of a marketing gimmick. What is your response to them?
There are at least a couple of ways of running Source servers at over 1000 FPS. I can’t go into too much detail on how we do it, but we primarily use custom kernel modifications and tweaks.
Many of our customers say that they do notice a difference between 2000 FPS and 1000 FPS servers, and it is probable that the game keeps more accurate time stamps with higher FPS rates. I don’t play at a competitive level myself, so it’s difficult for me to judge this. Since 2000 FPS servers cost us about the same to run as 1000 FPS servers, we decided to run our servers at 2000 by default and to let our customers choose whether to use it through a FPS selector in our control panel.
I have talked a lot about your server offerings, but we both know it takes more than quality hardware to make it in this industry. How about your support, what makes your support better than the rest? Do you find it hard to maintain support through both IRC and Live Chat?
We have very knowledgeable, full-time, long-term employees who are purely dedicated to customer support, and we are very proud of them. It is demanding to maintain support through multiple channels, but they are very skilled at it.
A question I tend to ask a lot among GSP’s is the current surge of new companies coming into the industry. Does this surge worry you? Also, how do you maintain to keep yourself at a different level than these “up-and-coming” companies?
The surge does not worry me greatly because we’ve always had a lot of competition in this industry. I think at this point our reputation for performance/quality, value, dependability, service/knowledge, and features provides a very compelling argument for choosing us over a newer provider that may lack in one or more of these areas.
We’re constantly improving in every area that we can to stay ahead of our older competitors and the few new competitors that do stick it out.
Who would you say is your biggest competition in the industry? Do you feel that you have done a great job keeping NFO above the rest or do you feel there is more to be done within the company?
I don’t see one single company as being bigger competition than any other. What I see as our biggest challenge right now is the contraction of the game server industry as a whole as the balance between consoles and PCs continues to move in favor of console gaming. This is a problem because most console games don’t yet support PC-based dedicated servers – something we hope will change soon as game developers realize how important the multiplayer component is to a game’s survival.
I’d say we’ve done a good job at keeping our eye on the ball and our offerings at the top of the heap, but there’s always more work to be done here. In fact, my “to do” list is about a mile long. The Easy setup page in our control panel could always use more autoinstaller options, for instance, and I’d like to rearrange some of our documentation around to make it easier to navigate. There are always hardware and software upgrades to be done, too, of course. And those tasks are just the beginning.
If you could point out the single best feature that NFO has to offer clients, what would it be and why is that feature so important to potential clients of yours?
It’s hard to pick out a single feature, but if I have to choose, I’d go with our service level. We’ve always prided ourselves on offering outstanding service. It’s important to know that there’s going to be someone there when you need fast answers to questions about basic setup, or routing performance, or why a supported plugin doesn’t work, or how to change the server around, or anything else that’s server-related. I wish my cable company shared our support philosophies.
I would like to take this time to thank John for taking part in this interview. I would also like to direct users to www.nfoservers.com for premium gaming servers.
Interview with NuclearFallout Servers, John
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