How a website can have Sponsors to help provide servers etc..

I'm curious about how this works, but does anyone know what the process is to have a sponsor provide you a gaming server for a gaming community?

Is a prospered developed community needed in order for someone to sponsor you, or is there a way to make a deal where they sponsor you and the community grows based on that.

I was looking into starting a specific game website, but some of the server costs seem a bit high, and I know that there are times when a site has had their servers provided for them for free provided that the sponsor gets advertised and such. Does anyone know exactly how this works?

 

This usually happens with CAL teams and such. My friend started a CS1.6 CAL team and they did good and got a few sponsors.

 

I used to run 4 halflife servers hosting TFC, CS, and DoD mods. What I did was I approached local ISP's and offered advertising in game for free bandwidth but I provided all the hardware to host the games on. My pitch was pretty good because most the gamers will pick a low ping server which generally translates to customers being close to the ISP enough to make sense for the ISP to try to advertise to the local gaming community. Its pretty easy to manage the server remotely so all they needed to do was assign me some rack space and bandwidth and I was off and running. I found it useful to be in a clan who used the servers and who could help kick in a bit of change for the upkeep of the server to offset my costs. You can make it work but after 4 years I just got tired of it and pulled the plug.

Don't underestimate the time it will take to provide a fun server, its not all fun and games. I used to get so much email about the server it got pretty insane and ate up hours every day for me to keep it all going. Now mind you its also got its good points, I got a private tour at Valve out of the deal and some swag to boot.

Anyway I'd try and find an ISP or other large company that has bandwidth you can use off hours and offer in game adverts to try to entice them into going for it.

Good Luck,

/Reby

 

Thanks for that info Reby. I can see where you're coming from by saying that, and I bet a lot of works is involved. lol. I had purchased 1 server couple years ago for CSS and it was pretty fun, but just a little pricey.

After doing the costs though, it truly isn't THAT much. I wasn't sure though if a dedicated server was necessary or not. I know a dedicated server runs much better, but the price difference is like 10 fold. It's like $200+ a month for that, and that I would not be able to handle.

Maybe the 30-40 dollar a month server I could handle, and with the and some web site hosting and such I actually only calculated about ~$700-$800.

I was mainly looking for 2-3 public servers to run a nice fun community.

Again, thanks for the above input.