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 works out to be much more than the pay-per-month equivalent, but we only expect usage for short bursts like on some nights or over weekends which should leave users with bills well under our competitors'.Would you use such a service? Would you prefer it to the normal pay-per-month providers out there? What criticisms do you have of the setup?

dtagames on Jan 14, 2021 [-]

Most likely you'll be charged by your hosting provider for instances that exist even if they aren't running, which how they would preserve your content and setup in between. That would make it uneconomical to charge your customer only for a few hours at a time. Game Servers Also, if you take the money you will be the one providing support -- and there will be support issues because there always are.

koellewe on Jan 15, 2021 | parent [-]

Good point. Probably best then if we only store the actual game config (a bunch of text files) and completely purge the instance when the user ends the session. Then when booting again we start afresh and copy in the config only.