cPanel Game Server experience
The thought of using cPanel as a game controller initially did not look like a good idea when it came out. As a
hard core gamer in my previous like as well as someone who made their lively hood as a webmaster, the merger of
the two worlds does not seem to lend itself at first as a match. Usually people who work on websites and web
designers are more concerned with tools and helper applications to help manage and create web sites rather then
to play games. However, as we evaluated the possibilities and setup a few game servers it became a little more
evident the idea had some merit to it and just may be a great new source of revenue for resellers and dedicated
hosters.
The installation of the game controller on cPanel went very easy, we simply logged into our WHM management control
panel found the cPanel icon and under that selected manage cPaddons. The menu then was very straight forward and
we chose the gaming control panel and then we found a new icon under the plugins section of WHM. The game server
manager was not as easy to understand as the installation of the plugin, reading the documentation from cPanel
would be advisable, however we thought doing that would be admitting defeat before the battle. After an hour of
clicking on things and seeing what happened, we decided to read the manual and use the setup wizard to bring up a
game server. The only game we had to test with was Battlefield Vietnam which we got working with very minimal
effort by following the instructions of the setup wizard.
Managing the server was quite another task, although we got the game server setup and configured, we had to go
into the hosting side of cPanel to control the game, once we started the game we were able to connect our client
and start playing the game. The game then took on a new life and we had to learn the ins and outs of managing the
game, of which we wont go into details here since that is entirely game specific, and another manual we wished we
read first.
One thing that really impressed us quite a bit was the ability to use remote servers to run games on while still
keeping the control on the original cPanel server. We were able to create an account on the cPanel server and then
use several other servers to run the games on, which kept CPU utilization on the cPanel server to a minimum. We
saw a great advantage to having one cPanel server to control a large number of dedicated servers running games on
them, this seems like a great way to manage a game server group without having to know a lot about how it runs.
Overall we were greatly impressed at the ease of which things could be done, although we had a few snags and should
have read the documentation first, we see a great opportunity for someone who wants to get into the game server
business using cPanel.
For those who want to read the documentation first:
cPgs Homepage
