1. Does GibGames offer reduced prices for "private" servers?
2. What plugins are included in your rate?
3. What control panel is used for your servers?
4. How am I invoiced?
5. Are discounts available?
6. I hate setup fees. How can I avoid them?
7. Will you sponsor my clan?
8. Can I ping test one of your servers?
9. Do you offer a trial period?
10. I only live NN miles from XYZ city. Why is my ping so high?
11. Do you offer Ventrilo?
12. Do you offer Team Speak?
13. Do you offer HLTV?
14. What are your terms of service?
15. Do you have a support staff?
16. How do I contact support?
17. Can we pay from multiple Paypal accounts?
18. How come you don't offer XYZ service?
19. I can't log in via FTP. Why?
20. How can I tell if my server is down or if it's my ISP?
21. Why do I get choke on my server?
22. How can I manage cheaters?
23. Will you manage my server for me?
24. Do you run multiple games on a single box?
25. Does GibGames monitor my server?
26. How long has GibGames been in business?
27. I don't ping well to your public ports. Do you have better servers elsewhere?
28. Do you price match other providers?
29. Can I get a dedicated server?
30. Why do you cost so much more than -insert random name here-?

2. Our rates include the ability to utilize most popular plugins. For Half-Life games this includes almost all Metamod-based plugins (AMX, AMX X, Statsme, Admin Mod, etc). Some bots are restricted as they can consume tremendous amounts of CPU. We also do not allow the use of any ping booster without our prior consent. Ping boosters cause extra load on the CPUs that we need to plan for.

3. Our control panel is a simple web-based tool for starting and stopping your server. It does not include any file management capabilities. We use FTP for file management since it provides us the necessary security, flexibility and logging.

4. We invoice at or shortly before the end of your term via Paypal. If you are paying monthly you will receive an invoice shortly before the 1st of the month. Payments MUST be received by the 3rd day of the month or your server will be disconnected. You may not receive any warning, so be sure to alert us of any e-mail address changes to ensure that you receive your invoice on time.

5. Discounts are available for pre-payment. There is a 5% discount for quarterly payments and 10% for semi-annual payments. The setup fee is also waived. We do not accept payments for more than six months in advance.

6. Effective 7-15-04, we are waiving all setup fees. We discovered that over 90% of our clients stay with us for three or more months making the setup fee unnecessary.

7. No. We have a select few clients we work with for sponsorships. Providing a server is an expensive endeavor and we choose our sponsorships carefully. Please do not bother asking.

8. Many of our public IPs are listed on the top of the main page. This should give you a good idea of your ping to our rental boxes since they are in the same facilities. We simply use newer and better hardware for the rentals than we do for the public ports. We can also provide IPs to specific boxes if you so desire.

9. No. We do not offer a free trial period. You are encouraged to play on our public ports and/or visit the servers of our other clients if you are unsure of your decision. We are happy to provide IPs for testing purposes.

10. Routing is like freeways. You may live close to the city our servers are in, but the route you take to get there may be congested. We suggest using a tool like Ping Plotter to help identify where the problem may be. You migt be surprised at what it will show you. Many people have probelms with the first couple of hops which are still within their own home network or ISP. You might also want to run a virus scan, Adaware, and/or Spybot just to make sure someone isn't stealing your bandwidth :)

11. We are able to offer Ventrilo through one of our partnerships. While we don't run the servers directly, you continue to receive support from the GibGames staff and pay one bundled price.

12. We no longer provide Team Speak.

13. We provide HLTV, but only as an adjunct to a server rental. Prices range from $1.00 to $2.00 per slot, depending on number of slots and server size.

14. You can find our Terms of Service here.

15. We have a combination of dedicated and part time support personnel. Many of them are present in our IRC channel and receive copies of any trouble tickets or e-mail messages sent to our support address.

16. You can open a touble ticket by logging in with your ID and PW (provided when you signed up) on our support site. You may also email us at support _at_ gibgames.com.

17. We currently only accept payments from a single account unless you are subscribing for a term of quarterly or more.

18. Our services are largely dictated by what our clients have asked for. If you don't see a service you think we should provide, feel free to suggest it.

19. We use a set of non-standard ports for our FTP services to reduce risk of server compromise. This means that if you are behind a firewall or router, the port is probably not mapped through by default. You have two options:
1) Locate your firewall/router documentation and figure out how to map the FTP port you were assigned through to your PC, or
2) Download a real FTP client such as CuteFTP or SmartFTP and use passive mode/firewall mode

20. The Internet is a large network of interconnected routers. Sometimes one or more of these routers fails. When this happens it can result in congestion of the routers that must process the increased traffic and, in some cases, complete outages to one or more locations.
If you cannot access your server, first check to see if the IP is responsive by pinging it (Start, Run, cmd and at the command prompt type "ping your server IP here)"
If the server is responding to pings, your specific game port may be down or frozen. While this is rare, it can happen. Use your restart tool to stop and restart the port. This should bring you back to normal operation.
If you receive no response from the ping request, there may be an outage somewhere between you and the server. You can report this to GibGames via a trouble ticket and we will make sure the server itself is still alive.

21. The short answer is that choke is usually a client issue. The server is sending more data than your client can handle or your connection is saturated for other reasons. There are numerous ways to fix this. First, make sure you aren't running Kazaa or any PTP stuff in the background. Try a virus scan and trojan detection as well. Often we find that someone on a 384/128K DSL connection is already using most of that for spyware or IRC eggdrops - unbeknownst to them.
Here is a brief article on how to address choke once you're certain your connection is clean.

22. The best deterrent to a cheater is an active administration crew. Most cheaters are only out to bother other players, so having an active administrative crew is often all it takes to keep them at bay. You can also use tools such as VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat - active by default on games that support it), HL Guard, Punk Buster, etc.

23. We do not manage your server for you. Think of your server rental like any other rental - car, apartment, etc. - you are responsible for the ongoing maintenance and updates and we simply provide the hardware, bandwidth and software that enable you to do so.

24. We often run multiple servers on a single box. This is made possible through our use of dual Xeon server platforms. With Hyper-Threading enabled, the system actually sees four processors. The dual CPU configuration means map loads from one game port do not impact another port. For those who think the application needs to be multi-threaded for a dual CPU box to be advantageous, we encourage you to run as many tests as we have before drawing unproven conclusions. On a server the multiple CPUs absolutely have a positive impact.
On our single CPU boxes we normally limit the game ports to one or two. In all cases we actively monitor the server for CPU and memory use to ensure that they do not exceed our standards.

25. We monitor all servers in many ways:

• Each server IP is monitored for ping responses from five locations
• Each game instance is monitored for response from two locations
• Each physical server is monitored for CPU and memory use
• Each physical server is monitored for virus and trojan activity
• Each physical server is monitored for security violations

26. GibGames has existed as a "business entity" since January of 2001 and was run as a hobby for a couple years prior to that. This included numerous Quake-based communities dating back to the QuakeWorld days. Almost every server we ran was ranked in the top 20 server list of the old CLQ.

27. Many of our public ports run on older hardware and/or in less expensive facilities. Since we make no money from these servers, it's important that we not spend too much on them or we'd be out of business in no time (like the budget server companies that come and go every month). We have a large number of facilities in various locations. Feel free to e-mail or submit a quote request and ask for test IPs in your area. Our rental boxes are all top notch as is the bandwidth they use.

28. Absolutley not. There are hundreds of places where you can rent a server for $2 per player slot, per month. 99% of them have one or two servers and will either oversell the heck out of those few boxes or never turn a profit and fold in two months. We are here to stay and feel our prices are very competitive. If you feel there is something we can negotiate, feel free to try. For example, we value a long-term relationship and discount servers for people who commit to being with us for extended periods.

29. The term dedicated server has a couple of meanings. In the hosting world it typically means a box that you rent on a monthly basis and you have complete control over it. If that's what you mean, then yes we can provide you with one. Our parent company provides dedicated servers of various performance levels. Feel free to request a quote through GibGames and we can provide you with all the info.
If what you want is a whole server dedicated to your particular game instance, please remember that we are using dual Xeon servers with very costly hardware. While we could theoretically run just your game server on it, the price would make you scream and we'd be out of business in no time.

30. Anybody can rent a dedicated server $150 per month and sell games servers for $30 per game, but what happens when he sells 5 servers on that one P4 box? When you see these guys, ask how many servers they have (and make them prove it), how long they've been in business and how they expect to STAY in business. As a customer, you should not have to change providers every few months. We have clients that have been with us for years - something we're very proud of.