… or how we decided to host our own public CS:GO Server and what this documentation is about.

Somewhen in autumn 2020 after the pandemic had already taken hold of everybody’s (night) life (some of) the old and venerable members of the ancient KiF Clan decided on playing Counter Strike again.

After trying (and failing terribly) to play on public servers we then tried the “Play with bots” mode - somebody started a local game and the others were invited. Thanks to modern internet connections this made quite lots of fun as long as the serving guy did not ALT+TAB to check his Facebook Page or whatever. This we did for some time and it became a weekly habit to meet on Thursday evenings for a round of yelling, beer drinking, calling out campers, cheaters and noobs - fun all-round!

But of course, this is not the most efficient way to host the game. We checked the offerings of some game server hosts and were surprised how unbelievably cheap it had become to rent a Counter Strike server. So, we rented one and had some fun and then the server lagged or wasn’t available and the support could not help AND WHY ARE WE PAYING 24/7 WHEN ON THE ONE NIGHT WE WANT TO PLAY THE FRIGGIN THING DOESN’T WORK???

And this is the reason why we decided to just rent a publicly available server and host the game for ourselves.

Most of us have a background in computers (we first met and played during our college days) but we did not have too much experience with hosting a server. So it was lot’s of trial and error, googling around and having slack conversations but we are now at a stage were we have set up a public server running it with a configuration we feel comfortable with. It has bots behaving as they should, workshop integration for all the right maps, and does not cost lots of money. And if it does not work, we know who has to fix it (and so far we have done so).

This documentation’s goal is to help other noobs to easily set up their own public and cheap (game) server by using the documentation we found with the additional advice for all the things we had to figure out by ourselves.