We've had a policy, since our founding, of compensating customers for any notable downtime that they've experienced, but it was never officially codified and posted. We've addressed this shortcoming now by defining and posting a 100% Service Level Agreement that covers all services that we offer here at NFO.

This SLA goes hand in hand with our full performance guarantee. Together, they help us to back up how serious we are about quality here at NFO.

As of January 14, 2012, this promotion has ended. Keep watching our news and FB feed for other sales, though!

For a limited time only, any customer switching their game or voice server from another host can receive 20% off! Just use coupon code AHGFFM in the order page and enter this information in your comments page:

* The name of the provider you are switching from
* The IP address of your old server

This applies to game servers, voice servers (Ventrilo / TeamSpeak / Murmur), and virtual dedicated servers/virtual private servers, and it's on top of any discount for purchasing multiple months at once. The old server will need be shut down within 30 days.

As always with us, your ordered price will be also automatically be grandfathered in for as long as you keep the same server in the same configuration -- so there are no worries about your price suddenly going up later! (Changing your server's location is free and also will not destroy your grandfathering.)

There are many bugs and quirks in this initial version, and we're still working out the kinks, but we've added preliminary support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 server rentals to our order page now.

All dedicated servers are unranked for this game, and it caps out at 18 players.

To see the "Servers" option in the menu of your multiplayer client (which presents the server browser), go to the "Options" menu, then click "Dedicated server" and "Enable server browser".

We've created all preordered BF3 servers now, and switched our order page over to creating BF3 servers directly instead of going with a preorder.

Some facts about BF3 that are coming up a lot:

* Managed dedicated servers and VDSes that aren't running Windows 2008+ can't run BF3. If you have a Windows 2003 VDS, you can upgrade to Windows 2008 via the tool on your "Server control" page, unless you run servers of types whose files we had to load specially for you. If you have a Windows 2003 dedicated server, you'll have to contact us about finding time later in the week to manually re-image or replace the hard drive; the operation is free, but we have to fit you in.
* Only Conquest64 mode currently seems to support 64 players. If you have other modes in your cycle, your server will kick players to get down to the number of players they support.
* Unlike BC2, BF3 does not currently support sending messages directly to individual players, reserved slots, !yell, or player muting. It does not have a "hardcore" setting, but you can simulate it by adjusting the individual settings on your "Easy setup" page.
* The game does have bugs. For instance, we've seen some server crashes, and player limits can be wonky. Blaze (the EA back-end) has also crashed once tonight, kicking all players. You'll have to bear with us on these, as we forward the crash reports to DICE to sort through.

We're completely inundated with customers asking a lot of the same questions right now, so please give us a little extra time to answer your support requests.

The latest Orangebox update makes all standard Orangebox (CS:S/TF2/DOD:S/HL2MP) servers run at a tickrate and FPS of 66.66. We have updated our order page to reflect this and created a KB article explaining what the change means.

Perhaps the most important consequence of the change is that our experimental "Extreme accelerator" FPS option has been eliminated. If you are a customer who purchased this option, please submit an order adjustment to switch to a different acceleration level, such as the ultraaccelerator, to reduce your price.

We've now opened up our order page for BF3 server preorders. Though everything we've seen points to BF3 using more resources than most other games that we offer, we have started it with a low preorder price that matches our standard price for other titles. (With a BF3 preorder, a payment is made immediately, and the game server is brought online as soon as we are allowed to do so, which should be the day of release for BF3. The free website and free Murmur server will be brought up right away.)

As our Bad Company 2 customers have seen, we offer the absolute highest-performing, most stable servers for Battlefield games (guaranteed). With the new high-end machine rollouts that we're making for BF3, we are confident that nobody will be able to touch us for this new game, either!

We've opened up our order page to Red Orchestra 2 server signups now. Servers ordered now will be created as beta servers, then upgraded to the full version after the game's release. Despite the high resource requirements of the game, we've set a very low introductory price that will likely have to go up later, so we recommend ordering now so that you can grandfather in the low one!

If you have a managed VDS or dedicated machine and need RO2 support added, please let us know. Because RO2 servers are very intensive, we don't currently recommend running large servers on VDSes (as these have a small amount of overhead from virtualization and many of our VDS machines use lower-clocked processors than our dedicated machines).

Update: The latest release of RO2 seems to work normally on VDSes.

We've been offered inclusion in the ranked server programs for both BF3 and RO2 and we should be able to offer preorders for both games soon, after we get our hands on their server code and do some testing to determine the resource requirements of each game (resource requirements determine our cost to host a game, and consequently prices).

Both game server types should be available for Managed Windows dedicated server/VDS customers on the game's release date, but BF3 may work a little differently than existing servers types. We should have more information on this in September or October, after we've hammered out the details internally and with EA.

We've substantially lowered the price for our 6-HT-core/6 GB and 8-HT-core/8 GB VDS configurations, as represented on our VPS order page. This new price will apply to all new and upgraded servers; if you currently have a 6- or 8-HT-core configuration, we strongly recommend updating to the new pricing through a package adjustment.

We've now added initial Minecraft support! We have some more information on our Minecraft servers specifically here. Currently, these servers are available in Dallas and Chicago, but we will be expanding the offering to other locations in the near future.

In addition to our regular shared servers, we offer managed servers on VDSes and dedicated machines. All existing managed Linux game servers have been updated to support Minecraft, and new servers can select it as a game to install. With a managed server, the command line can be adjusted, so the memory allowed for a server can be set to any desired value.