Hosting your own Counter-Strike server lets you control almost every detail of the gameplay. From the player count to the game modes that are being played or even what mods are installed onto the server.

The best part about choosing Game Panel VPS is that all of the Counter-Strike additions (ex.: CSGO, Source, Counter-Strike 1.6, etc.) use the exact same setup, meaning that you can use this article to host any kind of Counter-Strike server!

The main thing to have in mind is your plan RAM resources. Counter-Strike is not very demanding in terms of RAM. In principle, each 100MB of RAM can serve one player. In this case, if you purchase a plan with 2GB of RAM, it could serve up to 20 players with classic game modes like Public, Competitive, Gungame, etc.

However, if you plan on hosting your server with mods and plugins, we'd advise choosing a plan with 3GB or even 4GB of RAM to make sure that your server will perform at its peak performance at all times.

Since 2019, Valve requires you to generate authentication token in order for your server to be public. Otherwise, it remains in LAN (Local Area Network) mode, meaning that no one can connect to that server. No need to worry though, it's super easy to generate this token, however, you need to make sure that your steam account meets the requirements:

If all of these requirements are met, you'll need to head to Steam Game Server Account Management Console. There, you'll see two fields that look like this:

In the top field, you just need to insert the ID of the game you want to create a token for. On the second field, name your token so you could distinguish what it was created for, I've called mine CSGO TEST.

Here's a list of IDs for Counter-Strike:

This is how it's supposed to look once you generate the token:

The Game Panel is the main console you'll be using while creating, managing, modifying, or doing any changes to the Counter-Strike server itself. The Game Panel is easy to use and often updated to make the use of it even easier.

Once you log in to the Game Panel, you'll have no instances. In this case, simply click on Create Instance and choose Counter-Strike from the dropdown list, here you can choose what Counter-Strike server you'd like to host. This time I'm choosing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. If you did everything correctly, the instance creation pop-up should look like this:

This will create an instance or a container where your server files and configurations will be stored.

Now, click on the instance and choose the Manage option on the right side menu:

By doing this, you've opened a page where your Counter-Strike server will be located and managed. At this point, you just need to follow these simple steps: