A game server is a single-threaded simulation loop on a fixed clock, so it lives or dies on per-core speed and steady timing, not core count. A shared VPS puts a hypervisor's scheduler between that loop and the CPU, and the jitter shows up as missed ticks. Bare metal removes the layer. This pillar covers bare metal against a VPS and managed game panels, why clocks beat cores, real RAM figures for Minecraft, Rust, ARK, Palworld, Valheim and CS2, storage and DDoS reality, running Pterodactyl or its Pelican fork yourself, and the honest cases where a VPS is still the right call.

Le ping n'est qu'une partie de ce que ressent un joueur. Un aller-retour complet traverse l'échantillonnage de l'entrée, le dernier kilomètre, le transit et le peering, une file d'attente sur le serveur, puis l'attente du prochain tick de simulation avant que le monde ne réagisse. Ce guide détaille d'où vient réellement le délai ressenti, comment le tick rate et le netcode changent la donne, pourquoi le jitter et le packet loss nuisent plus qu'un ping élevé mais stable, et le levier que l'hébergeur maîtrise le plus : placer le serveur près des joueurs, sur du matériel qui tient son tick rate.

Bare metal wins on the two numbers that decide whether a game server feels good: worst-case tick time and worst-case latency. A single-tenant VM on hardware you control gets close. An oversold multi-tenant VPS is where fixed-tick simulation falls apart, because a vCPU scheduled a few milliseconds late is a missed tick every player sees as rubber-banding. This guide covers what a hypervisor adds to a tick loop, why the 95th-percentile tick time matters more than average throughput, how to measure steal time and MSPT on your own server, and when a VM is still the right call.