There are many different types of servers, each with its own strengths and use cases. Dedicated servers and virtual private servers are the most popular in the game hosting world, but which is right for you?

Both provide a complete server environment on which you can run any software, including games. From the perspective of the user, dedicated servers and virtual private servers are similar, but which you choose depends on the requirements of the games and the number of players you intend to host.

A dedicated server is a physical computer in a data center. When you run software on a dedicated server, it runs on the “bare metal”. The full resources of the physical machine are available to the user and any software they run.

A VPS is a virtual machine. You can think of it as a simulated server running in software — a hypervisor — on a dedicated server. That makes virtual servers flexible: they can be resized or moved to a different physical server.

Server hosting providers run many virtual private servers on a single dedicated server, each of which gets a slice of the server’s resources: RAM, storage, CPU, network bandwidth. When you lease a virtual server, you choose how big that slice is.

VPS hosts often oversell virtual servers, allocating more resources than the underlying physical server has in the hope that clients won’t need all of the allotted resources at the same time. Games need all the resources they can get, so overselling can cause contention and performance issues that affect gameplay.

Dedicated servers have resource limits too, but those limits are clearly displayed when the server is leased. Server hosting providers can’t oversell dedicated servers (although they might oversell network connectivity).

Most games that can be self-hosted provide guidelines about the server resources they need. Check the requirements to make sure the server you choose is capable of running the game with the number of players you expect to host.

Add-ons, modules, and expansion packs can increase the amount of RAM and storage you need, so be sure to take that into account.

A low-powered cheap virtual private server won’t cut it. Inexpensive virtual servers — think $5-$10 — allocate minimal processing power and RAM. They don’t provide the resources needed by even a simple game.

For example, Minecraft requires a minimum of 2GB of RAM. The cheapest VPS game servers provide 1GB or less. With 2 GB, a VPS can support 1 - 4 players with acceptable performance. More than five players requires 3 GB and more than 10 requires 8 GB.

Some VPS providers offer higher-powered virtual private servers with sufficient resources to host games. They are often marketed as hybrid servers: fewer virtual servers are hosted on the same dedicated servers and each server has more resources.

Hybrid servers can provide decent performance as a moderately busy game server. They are less expensive than dedicated servers, but the prices of the most powerful hybrid servers are in-line with similarly specified dedicated servers.

Dedicated servers offer the best game performance. They range from moderately powerful machines ideal for small personal game servers with a handful of users to the most powerful single-chassis machines available.

A top-tier dedicated server may have multiple processors with dozens of cores, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and several terabytes of storage. They are capable of hosting hundreds of concurrent users without breaking a sweat.

You can expect to pay under $100 per month for a low-end dedicated server more powerful and reliable than most VPS’s on the market. For a top-tier dedicated server, you will pay in excess of $1000 per month.

Network performance is just as important as server performance. The most powerful dedicated server provides a poor gaming experience if it is hosted on a high-latency network.

Most hosting providers advertise the bandwidth they provide with each server: the amount of data the client can transfer in and out of the provider’s network. That is important, but make sure that the network is also optimized for low latencies (often referred to as ping rates by gamers).

Your choice of a game server should take several factors into account,

• The resource requirements of the games you intend to host
• The number of concurrent users
• Your budget

Generally speaking, a dedicated server is the best solution but a high-end virtual private server might be good enough, depending on the game and the number of users.

Do you know what happens when you delete a file in a GUI or run rm file.txt on the command line? If you said the file is deleted, you are only half right. In fact, the data stays just where it was before you “deleted” it. You can’t see it because the link the operating system used to identify the file and show it to you no longer exists. But the data is untouched until the operating system uses the space for a different file.

It’s easy to restore data that has not been securely deleted. That’s bad news if the hard drive the data is on is sold, leased to someone else, or thrown in the trash. There are business, security, and legal consequences if server data is not securely deleted.

The only way to securely delete data is to overwrite it. You could also destroy the drive, but businesses typically lease servers that they don’t have physical access to or they own. They need to be able to securely delete data remotely. A quick rm doesn’t cut it.

Before I outline the best way to securely delete a file or volume, a word of warning. If you do this, the data will be gone forever — that’s the point. Before running any of these commands, make sure you really mean it.

Securely Deleting A File

As I have already said, rm removes directory entries. It does not delete data. To securely delete the data, you must use a tool that both removes the link and overwrites the data.

One such tool is shred, which will repeatedly overwrite the file’s data with random bytes.

shred -u file.txt

Shred overwrites the file three times with random data, although you can specify how many times the data is overwritten with the -n option. If you don’t use the -u option, shred will overwrite the data but it won’t remove the file.

Securely Deleting A Drive

The shred utility can securely erase drives, but we’ll explore an alternative.

Before running these commands, check that you have correctly identified the drive you want to erase. The command will run on the boot and root drives without warning.

Linux represents drives as files. For example, the file /dev/sda1 represents the “first” drive on your server. The dev directory is not a normal directory, but a collection of special files representing devices connected to the server.

To see the drives connected to a server, run this command,

`fdisk -l`

Identify the drive that you intend to erase all data from and take note of the special filename. We’re going to use dd to overwrite the data on this drive with either random data or zeroes. The dd command “converts and copies a file”.

In this case, we’re going to take data from a special file and overwrite our target drive with it. Linux provides several special files that generate a stream of data, including /dev/zero and /dev/urandom, which contain lots of zeros and pseudorandom data respectively.

dd if=/dev/urandom > /dev/ss__ # replace __ with drive number

Here, we designate /dev/random as the input file and direct its data to overwrite the drive. This will destroy all data on the drive.

For added security, you can repeat the dd command several times or alternate between random data and zeros with:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd__ # replace __ with drive number

On modern high-density drives, multiple passes are usually not necessary, but it doesn’t hurt.

Limitations

There are some limitations to this approach that you should be aware of. If the data is being backed up to a different drive, it may remain accessible. If the drive uses a modern journaling filesystem like ext4, some data may not be erased properly. SSD wear leveling can also interfere with secure deletion.

For sensitive data, it may be best to use an encrypted volume rather than relying on secure deletion. The data from an encrypted volume cannot be recovered without the key even if it has not been securely deleted.