Uptime is your highest-leverage ranking signal

Of every real signal GameSelectHQ's ranking uses — status, promotion tier, uptime, live players, votes, reviews — uptime over the trailing 7 days is the first tiebreaker after status and promotion. A server that's consistently reachable will consistently outrank one that isn't, regardless of how many players it had at its peak.

Here's what actually affects that number, in rough order of impact.

1. Don't let the process crash silently

The single biggest cause of measured downtime is a game server process that crashed and didn't restart. If you're not already running your server under a process supervisor (systemd, pm2, a game-panel's own restart-on-crash setting, or even a simple watchdog cron job), that's the highest-value fix available. A server that's down for five minutes every few hours will show up clearly in a 7-day uptime average.

2. Match the query port to reality

A server that's actually running but gets marked offline because the query port is wrong (or changed after a config update) looks identical, from the ranking's perspective, to a server that's genuinely down. If your uptime number looks worse than you'd expect, this is the first thing to check — confirm the port GameSelectHQ is querying still matches your server's actual query port.

3. Plan restarts for low-traffic hours

Map rotations, plugin updates, and version upgrades usually require a restart. A restart during your server's genuinely quietest hours costs you less real uptime — and fewer players notice — than one during peak time.

4. Don't oversell your slot count

This doesn't affect the uptime number directly, but it affects the signals right below it: a server listed at 32 slots that's frequently sitting at 2/32 ranks worse on live players than an honestly-sized 16-slot server that regularly fills up. Sizing your slot count to what your community actually uses tends to help more than inflating the max.

5. Let the system do its own re-checking

You don't need to manually refresh anything — GameSelectHQ re-queries your server on a regular interval automatically. The only thing worth doing on your end is making sure the server (and the network path to it) stays reachable; the ranking math takes care of the rest honestly, using exactly the same numbers a player would see if they queried your server themselves.