Hello there. I and my team are looking for servers to host our newly developed game on. Do you know such server providers? Low cost and with good customers support preferable
The two best choices are Amazon EC2, and Azure. You can just spin up virtual server instances, and manage them all yourself, and that works fine, although they also have additional services on top (Amazon GameLift, for example, and Azure has PlayFab) to make various parts of management easier. Both Amazon and Azure have Windows server offerings, so if you don’t want to use Linux, this is a good choice. I’d recommend Azure in that case.
Unfortunately, no cloud provider has “good customer support” if what you need is to learn how hosting and networking and firewalling and virtual infrastructure works. This is on you – you’ll have to read up on all this, using available documentation, or perhaps take available classes; especially Amazon has a VAST ecosystem of additional training and consultants.
The drawback is that Amazon charges very high prices for the network bandwidth you use – that’s probably their highest-margin product. It’s very high quality bandwidth, but it’s not cheap.
For games servers, using other virtual providers is often trouble, because most of them just provide containerized instances (DigitalOcean, Heroku, etc.)
The third choice is “root server” providers, where you pay to lease a physical piece of hardware. Generally, these tend to be older hardware, they tend to suffer noisy neighbor problems, and the bandwidth tends to be third-rate – especially for those who provide “unlimited gigabit ethernet!” I’ve had providers offer unlimited networking, but the peering to any transit ends up choking me off to 50 kilobytes per second, because they’re so oversubscribed. This is how you get “low cost” – you don’t pay a lot for services, and thus you don’t get services!
So, short recommendation: If you’re on Windows, use Azure, perhaps with PlayFab. If you’re on Linux, use Amazon, perhaps with GameLift. (Although PlayFab is more like Steam or Epic Game Services, whereas GameLift is a little more on the provisioning-automation side.)
5 Likes
That’s a really great advice. Thanks
1 Like
Thank you for the detailed answear jwatte. Exactly what I was looking for.