In September 2003, EscapedTurkey was founded on our determination of providing high performance game servers with a low cost for everyone to enjoy. We want to provide to the large segment of the game administrator population who wish to run servers, but could never afford it.
Our servers are user managed where you can highly customize your server on your own. Most of the help you’ll receive is from fellow admins, like yourself, in our forums. This allows us to dramatically lower the price of each server.
EscapedTurkey is an extremely honest group of administrators. Our priorities put game server administration before the extraneous business fluff, such as marketing, sales-pitches, and “sweet talk”. The end result is that we are honest, informative, and very flexible in our business style, and we understand a lot of the social and technical dynamics involved in game server administration. It also keeps your game server running at top quality.
Date Founded: 09/01/2003
Coupon Codes: Nothing Available Yet
Website: http://www.escapedturkey.com
stantz
December 12th, 2013
I’ve been with EscapedTurkey for about half a year, the service is extremely cheap for TF2 server I’m running (they have a special on source servers).
Pros:
– Cheapest TF2 hosting you’ll ever find
– Located in Central part of US
– You still get support even for a tiny amount you pay, read more in cons
– Works out of the box as you’d expect
Cons:
– You get exactly what it’s worth for the money.
– No locations other than Chicago
– Completely self-managed servers, you NEED to know what you’re doing or google tons and tons.
Having said all that, for me pros far outweigh the cons because of the cost factor, and because I can manage everything on my own.
Highly recommended if you want a TF2 server to “practice” on your managing skills, or just the cheapest server but still a quality one.
Caelum
December 21st, 2012
I have been using Escaped Turkey for a few years, for various things. Currently I have a minecraft server through them and 4 other game servers. I have never had a problem with them, they have worked with me to get a few games that they didn’t host before, and all it took was a quick email, They had a trail up with in a day! I personally have enjoyed the customer service, they always respond with honest upfront answers with out any problems.Personally I will stick with them. For me they are the best Linux hosts around. (:P the only thing I wish they supported was Day Z but that’s windows only xD)
Veritas
April 18th, 2012
I run a small gaming group that plays a unique Quake 3/Elite Force mod, and EscapedTurkey has always been one of the few server hosts that provides support for my game and mod out of the box. We were with them initially after our founding, but their $15/month pricetag grew to be too much for a very small, informal group that needed to run two servers.
However, after nearly a year of jumping between inferior providers and various VPS/hosting services, nothing has come close to meeting ET’s level of service quality or assurance. During the time since we left ET, our servers began to recieve massive redirected DDOS attacks – exploits of a documented bug in Quake 3 which essentially turns any server into a DDOS-spamming machine, in such a way that stopping it would mean making the server inaccessible. This caused massive downtime, and angry hosts.
Our VPS hosts couldn’t help, or wouldn’t… but EscapedTurkey did. When we asked them if they knew about the problem, and had any way of fixing it, they came back and told us about (then gave to us) a script they were developing to fix it, which (in the limited tests we’ve performed, as well as on our servers hosted with them now) worked perfectly! They provided this to us even though we hadn’t been customers in over a year, and when we told them we weren’t sure we could afford their service, they cut us a deal: One month free, and then a 33% discount for each of our two servers each month (from $15 to $10 a month per server).
Naturally, we were extremely pleased to switch back, and our service with them has been nearly flawless. Though we had some initial hitches in getting our configurations setup, everything has worked excellently and there has been no downtime to speak of (our servers have crashed a few times, maybe 5-6 times over the course of a month, but that’s nothing compared to our previous issues). While direct console access isn’t possible, and we thus can’t monitor chat and behavior on our servers in realtime, ET has even helped us with this – they are currently working with us on a way to monitor our servers through their Webmin-based control panel.
They are a small company (all of my support tickets are answered by the same person) but have been in buisness for many years, and are more expensive than some do-it-yourself VPS/gameserver providers. Thus far, they are entirely worth any extra expense, and their size has not impacted our positive experience with them.
IrishDragon
March 18th, 2012
I’ve been with EscapedTurkey since November 22nd, 2004. That should be answer enough. The company is great, the customer service is excellent. The prices have only gotten better with time. A lot of money has been reinvested over the years into bigger more bada** servers and hosting infastructure. Server locations are convenient for just about anyone in the USA and Europe. The CentOS has been doing a great job. There is a minimal learning curve at start up, but you will always find a Moderator who is willing to go the extra step to assist, even with mod installations. The forum and website have been upgraded over the years and is extremely streamlined and user friendly. My clan has been with EscapedTurkey since we started, and we will remain with EscapedTurkey for many many years to come!
Thanks for 7 wonderful years ET!
TimeDoctor
March 13th, 2012
I’ve been using Escaped Turkey for a few years and it is a rare beast, a friend to open-source and fighting the good fight for dedicated server hosts. I could not be more pleased with the uptime and service. Though it should be noted that I receive my service free, due to it being for the open-source project ioquake3.org I think that is another plus in ET’s favor since it shows how good it is for the development of new games.