Guides
The hour game servers fill up, game by game
A week of hourly readings: most games peak at 17:00 or 18:00 UTC. CS2 swings almost 5× between its quiet and busy hours; CS 1.6 barely moves.
· 5 min read
521 articles
SweetMask
SweetMask is a gaming enthusiast and content writer covering gaming news, updates, guides, and online communities. Focused on delivering clear, accurate, and useful content, he helps players stay informed about the latest developments, game updates, and trends across the gaming world.
Articles — page 2
521 resultsGuides
Reading a crash report in thirty seconds
Four useful parts in a wall of text. The first line is the category, not the cause — and the most misread line in any report.
· 5 min read
Guides
A control panel or a bare box
The decision is usually made on price, which is the wrong axis. What the panel genuinely buys is delegation without root.
· 4 min read
Guides
Announcing maintenance so people come back
A planned outage and an unplanned one look identical to somebody who did not know. Three timings, four sentences, and overrunning honestly.
· 3 min read
Guides
The disk is usually the thing
Everybody checks CPU and memory. A tick that jumps to four hundred milliseconds with nothing dominating the profiler is contention, not computation.
· 3 min read
Game Updates · Minecraft
Fabric 1.21.9 Mod Changes for Minecraft Hosts
Fabric details major breaking changes arriving with Minecraft 1.21.9, including Resource Loader API v1, entity mappings, and render pipeline updates.
· 3 min read
Guides
When a player asks you to delete their data
Three categories, and they are not the same. Anonymising rather than deleting resolves most requests without leaving a hole in a shared world.
· 3 min read
Guides
Hosting a game server from behind CGNAT
Port forwarding does nothing, and most people find out three hours into a firewall config that was correct all along. The two-minute check first.
· 3 min read
Guides
The smoke test that takes four minutes
A server that starts is not a server that works. Six checks, written down once, run the same way every time by whoever is there.
· 3 min read
Game Updates · 7 Days to Die
7 Days to Die 3.4.0 EXP Patch Breakdown for Hosts
7 Days to Die 3.4.0 EXP brings inventory filtering, drone trader recovery, sandbox print fixes, and multiplayer visual corrections for server hosts.
· 3 min read
Guides
Rotating the secrets a game server accumulates
Six categories of credential, each with a different blast radius, and most servers cannot list them. Rotate on departure, not on a calendar.
· 4 min read
Guides
Clocks, and why they matter more than you think
The symptom is never that the clock is wrong. Restarts at the wrong hour, certificates failing, and logs that cannot be lined up.
· 3 min read
Guides
Rolling out a config change safely
Six changes have fifteen interactions and no starting point. The ten extra minutes that make every change reversible by somebody who is not you.
· 3 min read
Guides
Serving custom content properly with FastDL
Four ways it goes wrong and all of them are silent. The directory layout, the compression, and the two places files have to live.
· 3 min read
Guides
What to log on a game server, and what not to
Four categories worth keeping, three worth refusing, and the retention policy that stops the disk filling on a schedule nobody calculated.
· 4 min read
Guides · FiveM
The database behind a roleplay server
It is a database with a game attached, and its performance under load is mostly the database's. Three fixes cover ninety per cent of it.
· 5 min read
Game Updates · Minecraft
Minecraft Snapshot 25w41a Adds Mounts and Spears
Mojang released Minecraft snapshot 25w41a, introducing spears, nautilus aquatic mounts, zombie horses, and mipmap visual updates for servers.
· 4 min read
Guides
Permissions inheritance that does not collapse
Model roles, not people. Inherit upward, never sideways. And the wildcard that grants every permission you have not installed yet.
· 4 min read
Guides
Surviving a traffic flood as a small server
Four different things run out and they need different answers. Why a bigger box rarely helps, and the firewall rule that outlives the attack.
· 3 min read
Guides
When to upgrade the box, and when not to
Four numbers measured at peak answer it. Plus the four cases where a bigger server is the wrong purchase entirely.
· 4 min read
Guides · Minecraft
Updating a modded server without losing the world
The world stores references to mods that are gone. Why the unit of update is the pack, and the step everyone skips because it feels redundant.
· 4 min read
Guides
Reading a profile instead of guessing
An hour of learning, once, and lag stops being mysterious. The three shapes every profile falls into, and what percentages do not mean.
· 3 min read
Guides
Backups that leave the building
A copy on the same machine survives exactly one failure. Write-only credentials, what to include beyond the world, and testing the restore.
· 5 min read
Guides
RCON without leaving it open to the internet
Whoever reaches the port and knows the password runs commands as your server. Ten minutes to make it unreachable instead of merely protected.
· 3 min read