What is Counter Strike: Global Offensive?Global offensive is the latest installment of the popular shooter series Counter Strike, which was released in August 2012. In the most popular mode, terrorists fight against counter or anti-terrorists, with the latter having the goal of taking out all opponents, while terrorists can take out opponents as well as plant a bomb and thus end the game. The teams consist of 5 persons, especially in the competition. Deviations are usually only in special modes or on own servers. This game mode competition is also used for large tournaments, which are for example played by the Electronic Sports League (short ESL). The largest series, ESL One, has already been held in large football stadiums with tens of thousands of fans. In addition to the competition, there is also the Deathmatch mode, in which you should defeat as many opponents as possible in one round, the arms race, both of which give you a stronger weapon depending on the kill, or lose again through a death, and the destruction, which is a mixture of arms race and the competition mode.

However, Counter Strike is not only frequently used around competitive field. Also playing with and against friends fascinates the players immensely. Even the predecessor Counter Strike Source (CSS) was very popular at LAN parties and CS:GO is in no way inferior to it. But if you can’t go to a direct LAN party, you can also meet with friends in TeamSpeak and play against each other there. Of course, these are even more popular with larger communities or clans that specialize in shooters or even CS:GO in particular.

If you want to use your own Counter Strike: Global Offensive Server, you have two different options. The classic variant is to rent a server from a provider, which has an advantage in the area of hardware and you usually already have a preset server and can start with the fine tuning or start directly. This kind of server costs money and in some settings you are a bit limited. But you can also host a server yourself on your computer.

The advantages are of course the costs and also the configuration options, but your own computer has to be running all the time, because otherwise players can’t play, you need some knowledge to configure the server, and you put a lot of load on the hardware, so that you often don’t play yourself or you have to fight with lags and other problems. So we are of course looking at the rental version, so that you can get to a CS:GO server without much effort and without major problems.

Basically you can influence some things directly when you buy, but not other things. Depending on what you rent for a server and from which provider, the offer varies. For example, you can rent a root server on which you can install Counter Strike and play from there. This has similar advantages and disadvantages as setting up a server on your own PC. You need previous knowledge and you have to do a lot, but in the end you are more flexible and theoretically you can change the game at any time and you are not bound to Counter Strike. But if you book a CS:GO server directly, you have a lot of influence on the number of slots, how many players can enter the server, if the server is private or public (depending on your preferences) and what name the server should have. Most of the time there is also an option for additional memory, where you can already pack cards, so that the loading times are completed faster. Often there is also the option to allow advertising, which can save you a few Euros, if you don’t mind the advertising. You should make sure that CPUs are used for the respective server. Counter Strike: Global Offensive is very performance-intensive and the servers should therefore run on the latest I5/I7 or Xeon Cpu’s at Intel. For a good ping, the servers should also be located in Germany, otherwise there may be delays in the game.

It is also important to look at the small print: The servers should always be up to date, so that you don’t end up lagging behind the original patch. You should also pay attention to good support so that you are not suddenly left alone with problems on a tournament day. When it comes to managing the server, you need to do what you like. Some providers allow you to customize it via database, while others only provide a web interface where you can do the most important things and a restart at the push of a button. An increased tick rate is often offered as well, which should improve events and movement. Since official servers only use a tick rate of 64, this is not mandatory. But in ESL mostly 128 tick rates are used. From time to time direct packages are offered together with TeamSpeak servers. Make sure that you don’t invest more in the servers than you would with another provider for voice only. Check out our article on TeamSpeak servers.