Some hosting providers ship machines configured in ways that cause trouble for game servers. These are the ones that come up often enough to be worth knowing before you blame GameDash.
Several dedicated-server and cloud providers install a modified kernel by default rather than the distribution's stock one. Most of the time this is invisible. Occasionally it produces behaviour a game does not expect.
Ubuntu on Hetzner is the case we see most. The kernel used by Hetzner's automated Ubuntu installations is known to cause problems with Minecraft servers. Upgrading to the latest stable kernel release resolves it.
If a single game misbehaves on one provider and works everywhere else, the kernel is worth ruling out early.
Hosts that leave the CPU governor on a power-saving setting can produce inconsistent tick
rates under light load, because the processor clocks down between bursts of work. The daemon
can force the performance governor on Linux — set enforcePerformanceGovernor to true in
Daemon configuration.
This matters more for simulation-heavy games than for shooters.
The daemon expects to manage cgroups and Docker on the host. Nested virtualisation and container-based VPS products — anything where you do not get a real kernel of your own — frequently cannot support that. If Docker will not run properly on a machine, the daemon will not either.
Check that Docker works on a host before adding it as a node.
The daemon requires root on Linux and Administrator on Windows and refuses to start
otherwise. Managed hosting that does not give you real root is not a viable node, regardless
of how much else it offers.
Game servers write constantly — world saves, logs, upload staging. The daemon's root directory also holds staged daemon binaries and chunked uploads. A node that runs out of disk fails in confusing ways well before it fails obviously, so alert on it.
Community covers where to ask and which details make a problem diagnosable.