Ask HN PayperMinute Game Servers

We'll charge the same as the cloud provider charges us, plus a small percentage to cover the overhead of storing game server config, running the admin console, etc.From initial research we estimate charging a price of $0.05 per hour for a 20-player Minecraft or standard KF2 server. This is a lot more than the monthly pay-per-month price, but we expect to use it for a short time like on weekends or nights. We should also charge $0.05 per hour for a 20-player Minecraft server or standard KF2 server. Would you prefer it to the normal pay-per-month providers out there? What criticisms do you have of the setup? nici's blog

dtagames on Jan 14, 2021 [-]

Your hosting provider will most likely charge you for instances that exist even though they aren’t running. This would be how they would preserve and maintain your content and setup in between. It would be uneconomical to only charge your customer for a few hours at time. You will also be the one who will provide support if you take the money -- and there will always be support issues.

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This is a great point. It is probably best to only store the actual game configuration (a bunch of text files) after the session is over. Next, we boot again and start over. nici's blog