About DarkStar -- It's been a long journey to the top.

Our Spawn Point

Our company's spawn point was on the CT side of de_dust. No, we weren't camping the bomb site. Ok, maybe a little camping-ish, but it was more like sniping. In 2002 our co-founder Chris Childers & Brett Guarnieridecided to launch a communications monster that would eventually become the world's largest and most sought after Ventrilo and Teamspeak network.

Our services give customers the DarkStar edge. Since our founding, our goal has been to provide our customers with both high quality servers and high quality customer care, an overall competitive advantage that no other company has been able to match. Through committing ourselves to the customer day in and day out, we have been able to rapidly expand into the steadfast leader in online voice communications. This is why hundreds of thousands of gamers connect to our high quality Ventrilo and TeamSpeak servers every day.

DarkStar Infrastructure

We're not some fly-by-night amateur operation. We have a brick and mortar support headquarters at 201 W. Olive in Bloomington, Illinois, three branch offices, and thirty plus worldwide locations. We route our own traffic, we announce our own IP space. We have our own in-house support staff, with full time technicians on shift at all times.

We're all gamers, but we're not just hobbyists. We're professional hosting; by gamers, for gamers. At work, we run game servers and voice servers. In our free time, we capture flags, plant bombs, and raid Gruul's Lair. But it's not all play, our cell phones are on 24 hours a day and they're set to beep if a server goes down. We respond instantly in the unlikely event of downtime. There is always someone on duty whose explicit job is to monitor servers and support.

We're here for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It's because we're gamers and we know what we want from a game server provider that we can make a network so refined that we don't know why people would go anywhere else.

A Timeline of the DarkStar Office!

Believe it or not, DarkStar Communications has now had 4 office locations since it began. Unfortunately we didn't learn how to work a camera until #3 and #4, when DarkStar's offices in Dayton, Ohio were moved to Illinois. Everything seen below happened during 2007, beginning with a string of abandoned rooms in the original Bloomington High School in Bloomington, Illinois.

Everyone needs to start somewhere. ( :

Not much huh? Fresh paint, re-sanded floors.. we put up drywall to create our own rooms within the various classrooms. With just the effort of most of our off-site staff (people not working at the data centers), we took the former school library / office, turned ballet / tai kwon do school, into a real 24/7-staffed network operations center.

By Late Spring

The main customer service center of office #3.

From the Conference Lounge / behind Jake’s desk

Mike Miller working in our old deployment lab, where hundreds of our servers were prepared for stocking at various facilities

Graduating to a Big Company’s Office

Most hosting companies would never show you their tangible existence, be they 1-2 man shows (as 99% of them are) or corporate monstrosities. We can remember years ago, before true 24/7 support was justified, when the support lines of all companies contacted our cell phones at all hours of the night. That in mind, we definitely weren’t ashamed of the old 24/7 NOC, but by August it had simply been outgrown. Everything was moved to our new offices a few blocks away at double the size (excuse the boring empty white walls- we’re working on that).

Gazzerro looking intimidating in the new 24/7 customer service center.

Stanley and Wendy in a brawl.

Clint and Stan posing for a yellow pages law firm ad.

And there it is. As time goes on, we'll post more photos of DarkStar's development in 2010.