[Azazel]

Well I have 16 servers (Hosting company) and we bind them to our steamgroup. So only we have acces to them. The good side of it:
- No lag (I've had lag on 99% of the random servers)
- No mods that effect the gameplay (I've had servers that fucked up the campain because they enabled nextmap.smx)
- Always the same players u know (Lots of players who only think of themself)

Also remember that the new custom maps are comming.

[recon0]

Valve really dropped the ball with L4D's entire server / matchmaking system.

It just doesn't work. Lobby leaders have no control once the game starts, and admins don't have enough control of their server, the lobby has trouble finding a dedicated server, teams can't be managed very well, players get randomly switched from team to team, etc.

Maybe in a few months, Valve will fix some of those serious bugs, but until then, I wouldn't even bother.

Side note: Versus on dedicated servers seems to be pretty messed up since the latest update (0 / 4 players on an empty versus server, it should be 0 / 8 .

[death_hawk]

You haven't heard of "sv_search_key" And who pays $17 for a server? That's just criminal.

[ChillyWI]

I pay $11 for a private L4D server for my clan. It's $17 for a public one. You pay a bit more with my host because they're a Tier 1 network, which means they're as close to the Internet backbone as you can get. This results in lower pings. If people ping fine to your servers elsewhere, that's fine too.

We keep our server private and invite only our friends on. This avoids the lobby system altogether since we connect directly with our password. It also means we're playing with friends instead of random people which makes our games far more competitive and fun.