Chase88 - Nov 28 2023 7:03 AM

---

Today marks 1 year of Refresh Gaming.

1 year ago and some change I got back into Counter-Strike community servers and I thought about how little they had changed since I played on them when I was a kid. I did some thinking and decided that I wanted to give it a shot and try to build a community that did things differently than others, putting the community first. So in a call with Sethibuns and RKO, I told them I was going to try and build a community. Sethibuns was the one to throw the Refresh Gaming name out there and the name stuck. So during Thanksgiving break from college, I started building Refresh Gaming and we opened with a Deathrun Server. I told myself that I would stick it out for 1 year and if I couldn't get something going within that year I would shut it down (Since I am a broke college kid) But that didn't last long seeing as Refresh gained traction pretty quickly!

A lot of amazing members came in during this time, including stockquest who would eventually become a Co-Owner of Refresh. We continued growing and opened an AWP Bhop server. It was around this time that we started to find out how our staff structure would work and we introduced operators as a role. This changed our community allowing more community input to go into development rather than just my opinions, as the members of the community were now the ones in control of our server. Around this time, we met the other Co-Owner breezy and he started building our surf server as an operator. I will say right now without breezy there is a high chance that Refresh Gaming would not be anywhere near where we are today. He 100% gave it his all when building our CS:GO surf server, and that led us to meet many more members and staff members such as our head admin GoodCall. So with that in this post, I wanted to thank breezy and stockquest for their commitment and help in making Refresh what it is today. There are so many people I want to recognize as a reason for our success, but just to name a few; unblazedsparks, Mr. Porkchop, Bobby Boy, Lwite, HYP3RION, Toaster, P Freely, Hell Maker, Chicken Joe, Beretta, mountan, LAMB SAUCE LOCATED, and so many more.

Now here we are with a physical server (being colocated soon^tm) and a bunch of amazing members. Y'all made this dream a reality and I can't thank y'all enough for playing and being a part of this community. I can say we are working our asses off to build everything back up for CS2 and I hope to make some new announcements soon talking about the future of Refresh Gaming. Currently, a lot of us are getting ready for College finals and once these finals are over we can start really hammering down on CS2. But I can happily say a lot of plugins for our servers are already underway. And I promise we will keep y'all updated with the progress of the servers as we go. CS2 is still something that we plan to take advantage of, even with most of the hype gone.

Colocation-wise we are looking at a January date as I want to make sure we have the finances all figured out. However, we will cover this more in "The Future of Refresh Gaming" announcement "coming sometime in December^tm". I can't thank y'all more for being patient with us as we work to rebuild from CS2's release.

Thank y'all for everything and here's to many many many more years of Refresh.

Everyone who has signed into our website has received the 1-YEAR ANNIVERSARY badge. Thank y'all for supporting and being a part of our community.

Chase88 - Sep 16 2023 2:35 AM

---

As the date continues to approach the release of Counter-Strike 2, we decided that it was time to upgrade our system. Counter-Strike 2 is going to be a chance for Refresh Gaming to really stand out, and produce the quality and reliable servers this community deserves.

Currently, our system consists of a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and a Webhosting plan from NFOServers.
Our OLD VPS Plan consisted of:

• 6 Virtual Cores
• ~6 GB of Ram
• 400 GB of HDD RAID-protected storage

The problem with our current plan is that we need more resources. The current plan we have makes expanding, development, and playability difficult. We also don’t have a whole lot of access to our website and database which has caused problems for our servers. NFOServers was a great starting point for our community, and we definitely recommend them, but for our future plans and goals for Refresh Gaming, it’s time for us to find a new solution.

So that’s exactly what we have been doing for about 2-3 months now. We looked at tons of options such as dedicated machines, bare-metal hosting, etc. But when looking at multiple factors such as cost to performance, cost to control, etc. We found that none of these options would work long-term for us.

Until recently we stumbled upon a fairly well-priced server for sale and found a reasonably priced Colocation provider.

This week, we decided to pull the trigger and pick up that server.


Our NEW Dell Poweredge r620 Server (rfg01) consists of:

• 2x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2680 v2 (20 Physical Cores @ 2.80 GHz)
• 128 GB of Ram
• 1TB of SSD RAID-protected storage

With this purchase we now own the hardware that all of our services run on, giving us full control. This also means we have more resources allowing for much easier development, expandability, and playability.

Colocation-wise we are still working out the details, but it is looking like we will be moving into the Evocative data center in Dallas, Texas. Putting our server in the same data center as multiple Fortune 500 companies. This means there will be a lot of redundancy making sure our servers stay online. (Cooling/Internet/Power)

If it wasn’t for y’all playing and being a part of this community, this would never have been possible. I also want to give a huge shoutout to all of our VIPs, If it wasn’t for y’all supporting our servers we wouldn’t have been able to make this massive purchase!

We will not be moving into rfg01 until Counter-Strike 2. Until that time comes we will continue to be hosted on NFOServers! We can’t wait to move into the data center and move everything to rfg01! I genuinely can not wait for Counter-Strike 2 and all that it has in store for Refresh Gaming.