I started HostingBuff because I was tired of reading guides written by people who had clearly never SSH'd into a real server. Every guide here is something I have personally done, broken, fixed, and done again.

01 // 18 years of game server admin

I have been running dedicated game servers since 2008. Not as a job, not as a side hustle — as the obsession that ate every weekend of my late teens and most of my twenties. I started with Quake-engine games and the original Source SDK, moved through every wave of multiplayer that mattered, and never really stopped.

Across those 18 years I have personally administered dedicated servers for:

What this actually means for you

When a guide on this site says "this command will fail on Ubuntu 22.04 unless you also do X" — that line exists because I hit that exact failure on a real server, lost a few hours, and figured out the fix. The guides are battle-scarred, not theoretical.

02 // Why I built HostingBuff

The honest answer is frustration. Every time I needed to set up a new game server — or troubleshoot a weird crash, or pick a hosting provider for a community I was helping out — I would search and find the same three kinds of pages:

None of those help when you are at 2 a.m. with a server that will not start and 40 people in your Discord asking when it is back up. So I started writing the guides I wished existed: complete, current, brutally specific, and honest about what works and what does not.

Yes, this site has affiliate links. They keep the lights on and let me publish everything for free with no paywalls, no email-gating, and no "unlock the full guide" nonsense. But the recommendations come first — if a host is bad, I say so. If two hosts are equivalent and one pays a higher commission, I still recommend whichever fits your use case better. The affiliate disclosure spells it all out.

03 // The DDoS years

Running a 5,000+ member Mordhau community taught me what hosting marketing pages never tell you: DDoS attacks are constant, personal, and extremely creative. Once your server gets popular enough to matter, someone will pay $5 on a stresser site to take you down because you kicked their friend.

I have seen layer-4 floods that saturated a 1 Gbps uplink in under 90 seconds, layer-7 query-floods that pretended to be the Steam master server, and slow-drip attacks that bled connections one at a time so the host's mitigation never triggered. I have spent overnight sessions on the phone with hosts swapping IPs while 5,000 people watched a Discord status channel.

This is why every review on this site grades DDoS protection as a first-class criterion, and why I am opinionated about which hosts actually deliver it versus which ones just put it on a sales page. Look at the reviews — the protection notes are based on what actually held up, not what the marketing copy claimed.

04 // What I run today

Right now — the servers I am personally maintaining as of this writing:

That is why the calculators (Minecraft RAM, VPS sizer) recommend what they recommend — the spec ranges come from real workloads on real hardware, not from copying a host's marketing chart.

05 // Editorial principles

Five rules I hold every guide and review on this site to:

  1. Every command is verified on a real, current OS. No copy-paste from old guides. If a guide says Ubuntu 22.04, I tested on Ubuntu 22.04.
  2. Hardware specs reflect real load, not marketing minimums. Underspecced servers are the #1 reason hosting reviews are full of bad ratings. I would rather tell you to spend €5/month more than have your server lag on day one.
  3. Reviews are written like I am the one paying. Because for several of them, I am.
  4. No paywalls, no email-gating, no "unlock the full guide." Everything ships complete the first time you read it.
  5. I update guides when the games update. Rust wipe schedule changes, Minecraft Java versions, Source engine breakage — if it changes, I revise.

06 // Articles I have written for this site

Every guide and review on HostingBuff is written by me personally. Here is the current catalog grouped by topic:

Game server setup guides

Game server panels

Hosting reviews (paying or formerly-paying customer perspective)

Free tools I built

07 // Get in touch

If a guide on this site got something wrong, broke on your setup, or is missing a step — tell me. I would rather fix it than have anyone walk away frustrated. The contact page has the email and the GitHub link.

If you want to suggest a game or panel that should be covered next, that is also the right address. The site is hand-written, so the publishing queue moves at human speed, but every reader request gets read and weighted into what gets covered next.

One last thing

Thanks for actually reading this far

Most "about the author" pages are a paragraph of LinkedIn fluff. If you got to the bottom of this one, you probably care about running a real server — which means you are exactly who this site is for. Go break something and come back when you need a fix.

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