How to use Cloud Hosting to host Private Game Servers (Minecraft + CS2)

First off I want to make it clear that this video is sponsored by OVHcloud, and for good reason. If you fancy hosting your own game servers, you’ll want to check them out. Now you might be thinking, ‘I can just host the server at home’, and that is true, but there are a few good reasons you might not want to. The biggest one for me is security. Exposing your public IP address to anyone connecting to your game server – or worse if your server is listed publicly, the entire internet – is never a good idea, and the fact that you have to expose the server to the internet so people can connect to it, it’s much better if that isn’t on your system or home network, and cloud hosting providers like OVHcloud put a lot of time and effort into making sure their platforms are secure and robust. There is of course the uptime too, as cloud hosting has 24/7 availability, versus needing to leave a PC running all day and night. I think using a cloud hosting solution is the best choice here, so let me show you what options you’ve got from OVHcloud for just that!

The most affordable option is a VPS – a virtual private server. These are basically where OVHcloud will take one server and create a bunch of secure virtual machines to essentially divvy up the machine amongst multiple users. It’s a really clever and useful strategy and means they can offer virtual servers for phenomenal prices – they actually start at under £1 a month for their Starter machine, although they’ve just rolled out a new set of VLE options, VLE-2, VLE-4 and VLE-16, with the number in the name denoting the number of cores and how many gigabytes of RAM you get, so for under £5 per month you get 2vCores, 2GB of RAM, 40GB of NVMe storage, and half a gig of internet bandwidth. That’s pretty great! If you are looking for something more eco-friendly, OVH also offer So You Start and Kimsufi options which minimise e-waste by keeping older machines in use and at reduced costs to you. 

Of course, if you are looking for something a little more powerful though, then you might be interested in a dedicated server. These are bare-metal, meaning you control the whole machine – no sharing it with anyone else. You can start with a 6 core Xeon and go all the way up to a 24 core AMD Epyc, although their four game server options are likely of most interest – those being a Ryzen 5600X, 5800X, EPYC 4344P or EPYC 4584PX – all of which come with at least 1Gbps of bandwidth guaranteed, and either 2 512GB NVMe drives in software RAID, or 2 960GB drives in software RAID, plus between 32 and 192GB of RAM depending on your chip and configuration. The other major bonus to getting a cloud provider to run your game servers is the extra features they offer – like OVHcloud’s Game DDoS Protection. With just a few clicks you can protect your servers from DDoS attacks and keep them running no matter how big or how long you’re being attacked. These are some serious bits of kit, and luckily I’ve got access to both the RISE-Game-1 dedicated server, and one of their VPS options, to show you the process of getting set up on either, or both.

I’ll start with the VPS – the option most individuals who just want to play with a group of their friends are more likely to choose, and I’ll go with Minecraft for the game of choice here. Setting up the VPS on OVH is incredibly simple. Once you place an order for a server, it takes a couple minutes for them to configure everything, and then you’ll get an email with the IP address, username, and a link to copy a randomly generated password. Logging in via SSH you will be prompted to enter the random password, then immediately change it. Once you’re in, you’re now just in a Linux terminal, as if it was your own machine. For the Minecraft server, you’ll want to run apt update and apt upgrade to make sure everything is up to date, then install the java runtime, I found installing openjdk-21-jre was all you need. You’ll want to install or update screen, then enable the server port with ufw allow 25565. Head to minecraft.net/download/sever and copy the link to the most recent Minecraft server build, and run wget to download it. Once downloaded, run “screen -S Minecraft“ so you can keep the server running even when you log out of the terminal, run “java -jar sever.jar”. It’ll fail, telling you to agree to the EULA, so open that in nano. Change “false” to “true”, then if you want to change any server settings, open the server.properties file in nano too, otherwise run sudo java -Xms1G -Xmx2G -jar server.jar nogui to start the server. That sets the default memory allocation to 1GB with a max of 2GB, and runs the server with no graphical user interface. And that’s it! The server is running and ready to go! Connecting to it via the IP works just fine.

Now for the really fun one, using the RISE-Game-1 server I’ve got access to to run a CS2 server! Being bare metal, the server comes blank, so the first thing you’ll need to do is pick an operating system to install. Luckily that’s really easy, just hit the three dots next to the OS section, click install from an OVHcloud template, then pick an OS. I went with the latest LTS Ubuntu image. They’ll then automatically install the OS for you and get it up and running. Again I’m just connecting via SSH, and this being linux it’s a bit of a pain, but luckily I’ve done all the troubleshooting for you, so let’s get started. First, apt update and upgrade as always. Then, create a new user account with useradd -m steam, and passwd steam to set a password. I found you’ll also need to add that user account to the sudoers list with adduser steam sudo, then you can swap to that account with sudo -u steam -s and move into /home/steam. While you can take the easier route for installing SteamCMD through apt, I found that just didn’t work right, so you’ll want to install lib32gcc-s1, create a directory called “Steam” and change directory into it, then run this curl and tar command to download and unpack SteamCMD. Run ./steamcmd.sh to install it, then it’ll open the SteamCMD console. Run “login anonymous” – or ideally a dedicated hosting steam account to avoid issues later – then type app_update 730. 730 is CS2’s steam ID, but you can install any game this way, so long as you know it’s Steam ID. Once it has installed, type “quit” to exit back to the regular terminal, then you’ll need to create a couple of symlinks – they are basically shortcuts so programs know where stuff is. In our case we need to create a symlink to a new folder called .steam, still in /home/steam. Create that folder, then use ln -s /home/steam/Steam/linux64 /home/steam/.steam/sdk64 – and it’s worth doing the same for the 32 bit folder. That means the game can get access to the tools it needs, so now you can navigate to the CS2 folder, that is /home/steam/Steam/steamapps/common/Counter\ Strike\ Global\ Offensive/game/bin/linuxsteamrt64 and run ./cs2 -dedicated +map de_dust2 – although much like the Minecraft server you might want to run screen -S CS2_server, and then ./cs2. 

With the server running, you can connect via the in-game console with the IP address – get your friends in, then enjoy the game! 

[Playing CS2 with friends for around 1 minute, mentioning server performance]

To be honest, I’m underselling the performance a system like this can offer. If you opt for one of these RISE-Game servers, or the outright GAME servers OVHcloud offers, you’re much more likely to be running the cs2-multiserver tool because this system can handle hundreds of players at a time in multiple matches – it’s properly pro-grade. That also explains the price tag – this RISE-Game-1 server I’ve been using is £60.07 per month plus VAT, which considering it’s an entire managed Ryzen 5600X server is phenomenal, but for normies like me I’ll stick with a £5-10 per month VPS. 

So, that’s how to set up game servers on both a VPS and OVHcloud’s bare metal dedicated RISE servers, and a bit about OVHcloud’s offerings. Once again thank you to them for sponsoring this video, and to you for watching. If you want to check out the multitude of options OVH offers there are links in the description for just that, and otherwise hit the subscribe button if you want to see more videos like this one, check out more videos from me on the end cards, and otherwise thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next video!