I make around $500 per month running a gaming VPN service - [link redacted]
I initially built it to route PUBG players in Australia (myself included!) onto the fastest links to overseas servers as the Australian servers did not have enough players. It was strung together with OpenVPN and a Discord bot as I never expected more than around 20 people would use it... mostly figured it would be me and my squad mates. Within three months I had around 350 users by word of mouth paying $5 per month. Most of my users came from established competitors as my service was a lot simpler to use. The user numbers died down over the following year mostly due to competitors offering an aggressive referral system and I was focused on other projects.
Last year I decided to expand to other games and regions. I rebuilt it as a standalone Electron based Windows app using a kernel network driver that can route individual Windows apps through my WireGuard VPN servers. I built everything except the network driver which was done by a Windows networking specialist - https://ntkernel.com
I currently support PUBG, DOTA 2, iRacing, Apex Legends, Rocket League, Final Fantasy XIV, Super People in Australia/New Zealand and PUBG and Rocket League in North America.
The service is stable and relatively scalable so this year I'm hoping to focus on the marketing in between other projects. Part of that will probably include a name change as I figure it doesn't make a lot of sense to people outside Australia
Yes pretty much. Most ISP's just buy access to the cheapest routes which are not always the fastest. I rent servers that are connected to the fastest routes and send the customers game traffic through them. This often results in lowering the latency by a significant amount.
The other thing the VPN does is allows people to choose which region they want to play on. For example, in PUBG, when you launch the game it pings all of the different available regions and selects the one with the lowest latency. This is not always ideal as there may not be any players on the closest servers and you end up playing against a bunch of bots.
Can I ask how you find the fastest links between countries and the servers for them? (Background: during my vacation last month I was playing an MMO from the APAC region but with servers in Germany, and it was crazy high latency. It made the experience quite bad. I wanted to rent my own servers and build a faster link for myself.)
While I can't answer your question as asked (and am not OP), I can at least point out that that when I ping my Contabo VPS I see
- 308ms from my landline ADSL2+ (not on the NBN yet, hopefully soon),
- 350ms over 0-bar 4G (house in blind spot, yay),
- 300ms from EC2 running in ap-southeast-2, and
- 312ms from Oracle Cloud in ap-sydney-1 (okay the x86-64 one was 309, the ampere one was 314-317)
which sorta highlights the sore-thumb reality of transatlantic cables: I'm 16,267km/10,108mi away, and there's very very little I can do about it.
The only thing I do really wonder about is if Starlink does p2p backhaul between the satellites, or if they're just floating mirrors... but after just clarifying that radio waves can't go faster than light I'm now unsure whether that would actually make a difference. Hm.
I initially built it to route PUBG players in Australia (myself included!) onto the fastest links to overseas servers as the Australian servers did not have enough players. It was strung together with OpenVPN and a Discord bot as I never expected more than around 20 people would use it... mostly figured it would be me and my squad mates. Within three months I had around 350 users by word of mouth paying $5 per month. Most of my users came from established competitors as my service was a lot simpler to use. The user numbers died down over the following year mostly due to competitors offering an aggressive referral system and I was focused on other projects.
Last year I decided to expand to other games and regions. I rebuilt it as a standalone Electron based Windows app using a kernel network driver that can route individual Windows apps through my WireGuard VPN servers. I built everything except the network driver which was done by a Windows networking specialist - https://ntkernel.com
I currently support PUBG, DOTA 2, iRacing, Apex Legends, Rocket League, Final Fantasy XIV, Super People in Australia/New Zealand and PUBG and Rocket League in North America.
The service is stable and relatively scalable so this year I'm hoping to focus on the marketing in between other projects. Part of that will probably include a name change as I figure it doesn't make a lot of sense to people outside Australia