Questions on game server hosting in general

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I’ve never shipped an online game with dedicated servers before, and I have little to no idea of what that entails. So I have a few questions;

  1. What are the popular options for PC game server hosting? AWS? Steam (does steam even offer a service like this)?
  2. Can any server host any game server application, no matter what the game engine is? How does this work? What do I need to check? How is the setup performed? I just send my game server app to whoever hosts the servers and that’s it?
  3. What should I expect in terms of costs, lets say if I launched a game comparable to DayZ/Rust in terms of scale and popularity? (I’d rather grossly overestimate than underestimate ;))
  4. Any pitfalls you know of? Or things I should check right from the start? Good practices, etc…?

thanks!

2

I never shipped too but I tried it to see what is it like.

1.AWS and Google Cloud are popular ones. Steam doesn’t offer hosting services. It’s much more like “internet”. You still need computers to make it work.

2.I used Windows Server on Google Cloud, and it was like an ordinary Windows 2000.You remotely connect to your VPS(virtual private server) then run your server.exe(which you uploaded somewhere thrn downloaded to VPS beforehand).

  1. It depends on your game. Both services offer some kind of price calculator. Expect about 30 bucks for a single DayZ server. Funny thing is it will stay at 30 'till you run more than 4 servers.(This numbers are a little arbitrary.)

4.That’s beyond me.

Good luck.