How Infrastructure Helps Improve Your Business's Performance

The iGaming industry is one of the most demanding verticals of doing business in today's digital world, and it is possibly the most competitive too. Functioning in the global market necessitates a robust, reliable, and expandable online infrastructure. A 500-millisecond increase in network delay already doubles the likelihood of online participants abandoning a game. Each second lost owing to lag or jitter can be detrimental to a company's reputation, resulting in decreased sales and potentially costing millions of dollars in revenue, all due to a single moment of latency.

Kristoffer Ottosson | Head of Hosting Services at Internet Vikings

In this interview, we speak with Kristoffer Ottosson, Head of Hosting Services at Internet Vikings, about the steps that iGaming businesses can take to ensure that their games provide the ideal environment for optimal play.

We are all aware that latency is a significant factor in the performance of iGaming operators. What, in your opinion, are the most frequent errors made by operators that contribute to unacceptable latency levels?

K.O.: Inadequate cloud and network performance, propagation delay, and peering are just a handful of factors that influence how much latency end-users experience. Businesses, for example, may invest in vast peering networks to reduce lag on behalf of gamers; nevertheless, this method has limitations and can only take you so far due to the capabilities of underground fiber, which can only deliver a limited amount of speed. Distance from the host server is typically the primary cause of latency. If a person is playing on a server that is based thousands of miles away, there will almost certainly be a time delay.

What kind of delay is considered critical and bears severe ramifications from a technical standpoint?

K.O.: When latency interferes with a player's overall experience, they are more inclined to abandon the game. Anything more than 100ms to 150ms in response time, depending on the game's demand, is considered detrimental to the operator's reputation.

So, to avoid the loss of confidence in an operator and, as a result, revenue loss, what latency level is considered ideal?

K.O.: Anything with a response time of less than 100ms is appropriate for online gaming. However, 20-40ms is the ideal timeframe.

In your opinion, what actions can gaming operators take to solve technicalities related to latency?

K.O.: Invest in infrastructure. Whether built in-house or through a partnership with a supplier, infrastructure has a substantial impact on latency and other performance metrics.

Latency can be caused by a variety of variables, including distance to the host server, traffic levels, and overcrowded systems. If your servers are overburdened, extra servers may help alleviate the situation.

The physical location of a data center is absolutely essential. The closer the data is to the intended audience, the less distance it must travel, resulting in lower latency. As a result, the more data centers a hosting provider has distributed around the world, the more effectively it can deliver low latency.

While some businesses may invest resources in developing and maintaining internal infrastructure, this is not feasible for all. Thus, for gaming operators, it could be a solution to partner with a hosting company with a global data center network and leverage their local infrastructure.

Are there additional benefits to these actions apart from reducing latency?

K.O.: From a strategic standpoint, the ability to scale and penetrate different markets worldwide can be accomplished more rapidly with increased data center availability. In addition, deploying your system in many regions adds redundancy to your architecture and makes it more resilient to regional failures. When one of your cloud services goes down, you will have another one that is up.

The need to team up with an established hosting provider that complements your business goals has been brought up, but are there any other factors to consider when making this decision?

K.O.: The iGaming industry is distinct from other industries and should be regarded as such. When selecting a hosting provider, choose one specializing in the industry since they will understand the nature of your organization, how milliseconds of latency may result in hours of lost revenue and a tarnished reputation, and how to mitigate these risks.

While it is not yet possible to completely eliminate latency, with strategic planning and selecting an excellent online hosting provider, it is possible to minimize latency to a level that will not interfere with your players' gaming experience. Taking the recommended steps will benefit iGaming operators by ensuring not only lower latency, but also resilience to infrastructural failures and compliance with data governance regulations — all of which are key drivers for globally distributed data architecture.