Our Staff Eats Ventrilo-bits for breakfast.
August 16th, 2007I get a lot of people asking me what the difference is between DarkStar and our competitors. At the risk of starting some mudslinging, I’ll dive into that here, with the nitty-gritty deep down differences.
We wear underwear with the Teamspeak logo on it. I thought that would look cool as a paragraph opener. Actually we don’t do this, and you shouldn’t believe any competitor that claims it. It’s a whole mess of copyright law, and anyone who actually does wear the underwear should probably be avoided.
Most importantly, DarkStar uses Mzima bandwidth. Mzima is route optimized for home users, making it the lowest latency bandwidth possible. It’s more expensive than normal bandwidth, but they took it out of my paycheck, so the company breaks even on the difference in cost. Most bandwidth, such as what our competitors use, is standard commercial bandwidth. It is designed to transfer data from a server at one datacenter to a server at another datacenter – and it does this very well. But that isn’t what a voice server does. Your server transfers data from you, to the server, to another end-user. Mzima works directly with ISPs to limit hops – we use bandwidth designed with stuff like Ventrilo and Teamspeak in mind.
Secondly, DarkStar gives all possible administrator rights to the owner of the server. Not everyone does this. Through advanced proprietary software, we are able to offer all administrative rights. This isn’t possible without Brett, our programmer that lives in a cage. Its August, my month to feed him, and I’m too busy blogging.
DarkStar has size. With size we can buy larger bandwidth commits, allowing us to buy bandwidth cheaper than our competitors. We pass this savings on to you. Through that savings, we are able to offer premium codecs at our regular price, which is rare in the voice server industry. At any given time, 300,000 users are connected to our servers. If you laid those users end to end, it’d be twice the distance that Ohio State will travel to the University of Michigan in a battle royal this November. If you rounded up all those users, and measured their body heat, it might be enough to possibly power a server or more, possibly, if the power was enough. You know, math and stuff.
We provide true 24/7/365 support. No really, I worked last Fourth of July. Send us a ticket on Christmas. Send our competitor a ticket on Christmas. See who responds. We answer support tickets when even Santa doesn’t. That’s a guarantee.
If you want to research this, feel free. You’ll probably also find that our locations, variety of payment options including ClanPay, and our custom control panel all set us far above the competition.
Oh, and instant setup. But everyone does that, and it’s really the same anywhere. I can’t really think of a way to improve on *instant*. But, you’ll still find a whole lot of competitors who use that as their main selling point. Watch for it.