Creating a CS:GO Server: system requirements and how-to

For over two decades, the online tactical shooter “Counter-Strike” has delighted gamers around the world. Initially launched as a modification of the single-player game “Half-Life”, CS is now an independent game - the current edition is called “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive”, or CS:GO for short. You can also play multiplayer games with friends or strangers in this version, a successor to “Counter-Strike: Source”, which has been available since 2012. Players have the option to play online on official servers or on servers created by the Steam community. In these cases, however, the settings are determined by the administrator of the respective server.

If you want a CS:GO server where you can play alone or privately with your friends (or, optionally, with the best known AI-controlled bots), this is also possible by hosting your own dedicated CS:GO server. How exactly this works and whether it makes sense to rent hardware for a CS:GO server is explained below.

If you want to play CS:GO together with your friends, you have three different options:

1. Start a shared, private game via training with bots
2. Join a Steam community server together.
3. Create and host your own CS:GO server

A joint game via the training with bots mode is quick to set up. Just invite your friends to the joint game beforehand, then start the server and adjust the number of bots as required. In this case, however, you are limited in terms of further settings. The restrictions are even stronger when you join a public community server together, because on there the operator is who will decide the configuration of the CS:GO server. In addition, it is possible for other players to join these servers at any time.

If you want to have complete freedom in terms of game mode and server configuration, the third option is the right solution for you. On a dedicated server that you host yourself, you can decide who can join, and customize the setup entirely according to your preferences in real-time. Since the dedicated server software takes up its own computing capacity and does not run together with the client, you will need additional hardware and broadband power for the CS:GO server in this case. Renting these network and server resources from a provider is not only a practical, but also cost-effective alternative to a second PC, which would be associated with additional acquisition and electricity costs.

The hardware requirements of an own server for “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” are not too demanding. There are regular updates, including smaller performance updates, but the game has already been around for a few years. However, the developer Valve does not provide any concrete information about the minimum setup needed. Therefore, specs gathered from experience are the best point of reference for the composition and creation of a new CS:GO server.

The clock rate required depends on how many players are active on your CS:GO server at the same time. In a minimum configuration for a few server participants, Intel or AMD CPUs with 2 GHz are adequate. However, if you are planning a server for lots of players (12 players or more), a CPU with 2.8 GHz or more will be required. An important factor to consider here is that the CS:GO server application is basically designed as a single-core application. To ensure optimal performance, a host system with high single-core performance is therefore recommended, as distributing it across multiple cores will be suboptimal and automatically reduces performance.

In terms of RAM, a CS:GO server is not very demanding. In principle, you can plan on 100 MB per user for hosting the standard modes and maps. With a base value of 2 GB RAM, you can theoretically serve up to 20 players. In practice, however, you should provide a certain buffer here. If you want to use mods and plugins on your CS:GO server, this will put some strain on the RAM: In this case, additional RAM is recommended.

When you create a CS:GO server, you must of course also make sure that there is enough storage space for the individual game files. For the basic installation without additional mods, maps, plugins, etc. you should plan around 15 to 20 GB. If you want to create regular backups, you should of course expect to need much more hard drive space (recommendation: 50 GB or more).

Whether you choose classic HDD data carriers or more powerful SSDs, this only plays a small role in a CS:GO server. However, due to the faster write and read speeds that SSDs feature, and the fact that they have dropped considerably in price, there is a lot to be said for using the more modern storage solution.

To manage your server hardware you also need an operating system. The CS:GO server software ‘SteamCMD’, which incidentally also enables hosting of various other Steam games, is basically available for all three major systems - Windows, macOS and Linux. However, there are always problems when installing on macOS, which is why we recommend using the server systems from Microsoft (Windows Server 2016 or 2019) and UNIX/Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, openSUSE).

Keep in mind that you also need to budget hardware resources for the operating system.

For Windows Server 2016, for example, Microsoft recommends at least:

• a 1.4 GHz processor (64-bit)
• 512 MB or 2 GB of RAM (without or with graphical user interface, respectively)
• 32 GB hard disk space

For installing Ubuntu, which is popular among Linux fans, the developer Canonical recommends the following minimum values (version 20.04):

• a 2 GHz processor (64-bit)
• 4 GB of RAM
• 25 GB hard disk space

Alternatively, the Ubuntu Server Edition, which does not have a graphical user interface by default, is a much neater edition that is fine with a 1 GHz processor (64-bit), 1 GB of RAM and 2.5 GB of hard drive space.

As a shooter, ‘Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’ is one of the types of games where it is particularly important that players and servers have the lowest possible ping. In other words, the time it takes for data packets to travel from the players’ devices to the server, or vice versa, should be as short as possible. This means that your CS:GO server needs to have a good broadband connection. From the server’s point of view, the upload value (also called “uplink”) is important, as it determines how fast the server can send data to the players.

Valve specifies 53.4 Kbit/s per player as the upload guideline for Source games like CS:GO. This results in the following in relation to the server size:

Renting hardware for a CS:GO server is much more convenient than assembling and purchasing it yourself. In addition, you are much more flexible with a rented solution for your CS:GO server, because in most cases you can increase or decrease the booked performance or cancel it completely. In addition, you can now rent servers or server resources at very affordable prices.

However, the search for a suitable provider is not that easy - especially since you often have to choose the right server model. At IONOS, the following three variants are available to you:

• CS:GO Dedicated Server (dedicated server, optionally self-administered or as managed solution by IONOS)
• vServer (Virtual Private Server, or VPS)
• Cloud Server

To address the question of which IONOS model is best for creating a CS:GO server, let's take a brief look at the three available solutions:

Decide on a Cloud Server, you get access to virtualized resources, whose concrete performance capacity depends on the selected tariff. If you want to make your CS:GO server spontaneously available for more players, you can conveniently increase and then decrease these capacities at any time via your account. Since the performance is billed per minute, you only pay for the resources that you have used.

With a vServer, you also rent virtualized resources. However, this is basically a fixed setup for which you pay a fixed amount each month – regardless of whether you use your CS:GO server or not. If you plan to make your server available continuously, however, this model is significantly more cost-effective than a cloud server.

However, the best option for creating a CS:GO server with IONOS is a Dedicated Server. With this model, you get access to hardware that is specifically assigned to you and is optimal for hosting individual applications. In particular, the strong single-core CPU power with up to 3.8 GHz is a good argument for a CS:GO dedicated server.

As mentioned, IONOS also offers different tariffs for each of the three server models shown, which differ in terms of performance and costs. As between the three options vServer, Cloud Server and Dedicated Server, you also choose one option here. With the cloud server, you have the advantage that you can adjust your initial choice very quickly and easily if you need more or less CPU, RAM and disk space.

In the table below, we’ve presented three possible scenarios for your own CS:GO server.

Once you have found the right hosting solution for your own CS:GO server, all that remains is to install the required operating system. The classic server operating systems like Windows Server, Linux or Debian are recommended - ideally, you won’t be running any other applications on the server besides the system software and the SteamCMD.

In the following instructions, we will show you how to get a CS:GO server running on Windows Server 2016 as a IONOS customer (vServer, Cloud Server, Dedicated Server).

The first time you connect to the server, you will receive a security warning: the certificate is not yet trusted. You can finally establish the remote connection by confirming your action.

To create a CS:GO server, you will need the SteamCMD server application, which can be downloaded from the following download link.

Now type the following command into the Steam input line “Steam>” to set the installation directory (here in C:) for the CS:GO server:

In the next step, log in to the public Steam server as an anonymous user:

Finally, install the latest dedicated server version of “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” with the following input:

Once the installation is complete, log out of the Steam server by typing “quit”.

When you create a CS:GO server, link it to an official Steam account using a Game Server Login Token (GSLT). Otherwise, you’ll only be able to deploy your server on a local network.

Make a note of the generated token or save it in a separate document to have it ready when you connect to the server. You can also find the code in the Steam game server account management at any time.

Now you can finally start your own public CS:GO server. The easiest way is via a command prompt. Open the Windows command line and change to the CS:GO Dedicated Server directory. We have placed the server application under C:\csgo-ds, so the appropriate CMD command in our case looks like this:

With the appropriate CS:GO console parameters, you can now start the server in the directory. It is important that you add the Game Server Login Token in addition to the information about the game mode, map and so on. A possible start setup (Casual Game, Arms Race, Startmap: de_dust2) including the attached GSLT can be executed with the following command: