Tell me about the clan.
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In the beginning
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The Angry Angels, TAA for short, formed in October of 1998, starting out as a Q2CTF clan. TAA rapidly grew and developed a good reputation as a friendly and fun clan. Although a good way from the top of competitive play, fairness and dedication ensured TAA made it's way into the hearts of many.

Over the years TAA has had it's good and bad times. It was a great loss when the Q2CTF team decided to cease competitive play but out of the ashes rose the first TAA Counter-strike team. Despite many other attempts to move into other games, TAA has primarily been a one game clan. At our prime we did have teams for Q2CTF, Q2AQ2 and CS all running at once, oh the good old days :)

After many years of TAA being what would generally classed as a large clan, players drifted away as their specialist game became less popular. Eventually only the CS team remained. I took over the reigns as team captain, the team responded well to my whip and tightened up. SparKeh became invaluable and moved into the deputy captain spot.

After much deliberation I decided to step down and take a break from online gaming due to real life considerations. SparKeh made a valiant effort to keep the team alive, and he did for many months, but in the end it was too much work. The TAA CS team officially folded in October of 2002. SparKeh and I did make a pledge that they would return and reform a new TAA CS team in the new year. And we did :) Well, SparKeh did :D

The gathering.
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TAA-Gaming was formed in January 2003 and was the result of pure effort on behalf of SparKeh. Many old school TAA players returned, some immediately, some after much longer periods. At that time I still had real life issues which demanded my 100% attention. SparKeh is still the CS team captain and also the primary drive behind TAA-Gaming. I found the time to become active again online and hope to become more productive every day.

Clanports, how did that happen?
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A side effect really. Over the years TAA's clan members have always availed themselves of the many services TAA have accumulated. Clanports, web server, email server, bncs, voicecomms etc. etc. What many clan members failed to realise is that these services cost money.

TAA-Gaming was initially a reforming of the TAA CS team. In the past the TAA CS team was financially supported solely by myself, although contributions from a small number of clan members did help. It was decided that TAA should start financing itself properly but due to our average skill level full clan sponsorship was not an option. It was soon clear that not all clan members were in a position to make financial contributions. Clan members who could afford it have contributed but in the spirit of fairness a longer term solution was sought.

We (SparKeh and myself) decided that investing in a server and co-locating would mean a cost effective route to providing services to the clan. Let's not get carried away here though, passion for your clan only stretches so far. SparKeh and I are the only investors and costs are still involved. Therefore we decided to rent clanports as a way of recuperating our investment. What we did not foresee was the level of interest from clans. After further discussion it was decided we would invest further in order to fulfil demand.

Why clanports though?
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Primarily because we could and the demand was there, however many other factors influenced the decision. We felt that clanport rental had become an exploited market and clans were no longer getting value for money. The largest gripe we have with most clanport providers is inflexibility. Too many have moved towards the bundling of value added services in order to increase the perceived value of their clanport packages. Price wars between providers is not unheard of either. As members of a clan ourselves we recognised the need for flexible clanports. Combined, SparKeh and I have over 15 years server management experience and also in depth experience in running and maintaining hlds based clan/public/lan servers. We understand that clans do not always have a "techie person" to maintain/setup their clanport so we have made the process as easy as humanly possible. All purchased services come pre-configured to each clans specifications. All patches, updates, addons & plugins are kept up to date by ourselves and extensively tested before implementation. We can do as much or as little as required by each clan.

So what makes TAA-Gaming different?
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Three things mainly.

Firstly our flexible approach to pricing, we don't bundle. Many clans simply can't afford a high priced clan port and would willingly drop additional services if the price reflected such. Our pricing structure is based on the provision of a clanport which fits your clans needs exactly and paying only for those services. This does not mean we do not provide all the services other providers do, just that we don't force them upon you. An example - a clan wants a pure match/war server with wwcl plugin but no other frills. 10 player/branded/private/metamod/wwcl = £25 per month (breakdown 10 player = £20, wwcl addon = £5). Please see our "servers" section for a full price list. What we are not saying is "we are cheaper than so'n'so", we just price our offering in a different way. People in general are used to deciding what they pay for, why should clanports be any different?

Secondly, we don't overload our servers. We don't suffer from the delusion of becoming millionaires from renting clanports and firmly believe quality of service should always be the highest concern. We promise (yes promise) that our servers will never (yes never) be knowingly overloaded and all ports are rented on a 100% usage figure. Sounds complicated, what does this mean I hear you ask? Well, many clanport providers work out how many ports a certain server can take based on different methods, some by player numbers, some by average usage, etc. etc. Certain methods can lead to poor server performance when all ports are at peak usage. Ever been happily playing on a server and suddenly every ones ping jumps up 20+ms? Overloading is often the cause. Our servers are filled one port at a time. As each port is added we wait for it to fill with players, a figure of CPU usage for that port is then taken at it's maximum capacity, averaged over several maps/hours/days. If a port is added which takes the total CPU usage for that server over 90% we move that port to other server and start the filling process again. We do however understand that ports can suffer from anomalies which can cause spikes in CPU usage. In addition to our very conservative server loading methods we also pledge that should ports on a particular server become laggy and we cannot resolve the issue quickly, the last port on that server will be moved to another server.

Thirdly, we try to give something back to the online gaming community. As it becomes cost effective to do so we will add additional public servers for all to play on. These are hosted on the same servers we use for clanports and therefore an excellent way for players and clans to witness first hand the quality and performance of our ports. A one week trial is also provided when purchasing a clanport, should a clan be unhappy and we are unable to quickly resolve all problems to their satisfaction a full refund will be given.

At this point my colleague whispers "so are you any better than the rest then?" She really loves to put me on the spot :( My answer is this.
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If I had to give a yes or no answer then it would be no. Each provider has their own way of doing things, some clans will prefer theirs, others will prefer ours. Our main concern is the happiness of our clients, if they are happy, so are we. So far our "ways", for want of a better word, have been very well received. I hope this feeling continues to grow as we too grow. I also hope clans become aware that although we are undoubtedly in this to make some money, we are prepared to provide clans with clanports tailored to "their" requirements and charge accordingly.

Not feeling quite satisfied she responds "are your servers faster than others though?" I was feeling a little under pressure now :/ Anyway, I asked for it so here goes.
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Again, if I had to give a yes or no answer it would be no. There are many factors which affect the perceived "speed" of a clanport. To be totally honest, no one in the UK will provide clan ports setup purely for speed. The reason behind this is cost. To run a clan port at it's maximum performance is only a few settings different from a normal clanport but those settings ensure that server runs flat out. This of course has a side effect, CPU usage. To give an example, this is quoted verbatim from Zibbo, original author of the "HLDS Soft pingbooster" from www.UDPSoft.com

"For reference on what kind of a hardware you might need, I've been testing with a 1ghz amd processor, and without metamod I can run a 14 player server (with clients with fast connections) without any significant slowdown. With a metamod + some small mods that number goes down to about 10."

To put this into real world price perspective, "maxperf" clanports would be 3-4 times the price of standard clanports, even at our prices. We are however, considering providing such clanports in the future as we believe a market for "maxperf" clanports will emerge.

Back to basics now really. The three main things people believe make a fast server are as follows:
1) Low ping (latency).
2) 0% packetloss (data lost in transit from server to client).
3) 0 Choke (server to client flood protection).

The first two are directly related to quality of the connection the server is hosted on and also the quality of connection the client is using. Our servers are hosted directly in Telehouse London which provides the fastest connections available in the UK. Ping can be affected by server load as previously mentioned but does not apply to our clanports. We have not heard any mention of packetloss so far but experience shows it is nearly always the clients connection which is at fault. Choke is a strange one though, I strongly recommend reading this document to better understand this phenomenon. I would say over 80% of the players I know do not fully understand what choke is and instinctively blame the server for it. This assumption is totally inaccurate and primarily client settings or connection speed are responsible. Broadband users can nearly always eradicate choke by changing client side settings. ISDN and modemers are restricted by their connection and will normally see choke at the start of a round (spawn) whilst on a server with 14 players or more. The choke usually subsides within seconds of spawning and is due to the volume of data being reported by the server to the client. If anyone needs any help in resolving choke issues please feel free to contact me directly.

What can we expect in the future?
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Good question :) Considering the investment we have already made I foresee the provision of quality clanports and associated services to be our mainstay. Many clanport providers have come and gone, for all sorts of reasons. We want to make sure our services remain competitive whilst still providing all the services clans want. Our investment plan includes the addition of "internet services" servers. These will provide new services we do not currently offer such as domain name management, web hosting, email, forums, bncs, shells, etc. etc. all at prices clans can afford. Online gaming is really taking off in the UK and we aim to expand continuously, providing services to a growing market.

Well, if you've got this far, thanks for reading. I hope this missive has given you some food for thought at the same time as filling in some blanks and helps you getting to know where we are coming from.

Vapor, on behalf of SparKeh, TAA-Gaming.