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Interest in game server hosting by hour/day instead of by month?
Void_Whisperer
Member
Someone recently proposed an idea to me to offer game server hosting based on hours/days instead of by month. I was wondering if there was actually any interest in this before I tried embarking on this?
Game servers in hours/days (similar to how DO does cloud servers) instead of months?
- Hours/days or months?41 votes
- Hours/days60.98%
- months39.02%
Comments
Create a poll.
for clans it could be interesting (private match/war.)
I was thinking also, for competitive leagues if they have a scrim or a match, or want to host a lobby
Interesting, you hardly ever hear about doing hourly/daily servers for games. Would definitely be good for teams doing matches. I could have seen this doing well back in the day when Counter-Strike 1.5/1.6 was really popular.
It could work, but i think that you have to be involved in those communities yourself in order to promote your service and make some earnings if you are only going to use this pricing system, i'm not sure but i think it is a small userbase and not very profitable.
What do you mean by game server? Like a server built specifically to host minecraft and only minecraft? etc I didn't even know there was a market for that!
If the prices are fair and the locations are good, I can see me and a few of my friends using this. It would be quite useful for when we want to play online together on a private server. No more messing with Hamachi and creating game servers on our own computers.
Yes, a server optimized for running games, paid for on a slot by slot basis, and honestly, there's a pretty huge market for that kinda stuff.
We have someone doing it on iwstack. I mean create templates and deploy on demand using API.
It is possible, but I doubt it will be financially sustainable.
Problem with the hourly scheme is that game server providers make their money when customers aren't using their service. If people pay just when they want to use the service odds are you'll find it hard to turn a profit.
Or you just adjust hourly prices accordingly. All sorts of people who would be willing to pay a higher per-unit cost than to shoulder the risk of "owning" a resource. This is the essence of the VPS market. Now, Jon you'd know better than I whether or not that supply curve would overlap at all with demand, but the principle is sound.
From a business perspective, I do agree though that what you will run up against is that there is likely to be idle capacity (I don't game at all so maybe not) during off-peak hours. For big cloud providers, they have a general purpose market to cushion excess supply (or even a spot market like AWS for non time sensitive work loads).
I know that when I ran a GSP we had a pretty good idea of how we were making money from a resource/usage/cost perspective. The premium on the hourly rate would have to be pretty high. So high that along with the inconvenience of having to configure their server each time a new instance is spun up, it's just a better value to commit on a monthly basis.
The cost of a private server most games can be had for $10/month or less. Set it up once and you're done.
Hard to beat that kind of value these days.
Ok you win.
I've thought about providing by hours/day, it would be so expensive to the buyer that it wouldn't be worth. If they can get a good server for $15~/mo, they would probably only pay up to $2 per day before realizing that the price is too expensive. And with a $100/mo E3 dedi you'd need a lot of orders per month to just break even
Haha. To be honest it was so long ago, I don't pretend to be an expert. I always said to myself I wasn't THAT good at selling game servers. We were just at the right place at the right time.
I wonder what answering support tickets would be like. Spending hours helping customers with their problems and getting paid like $0.05 apiece.
i know some game server provider offer 1-3 hour for free....
http://www.gameservers.com/free/ ?
This idea is very good and will certainly work. I have worked with GSP's and have met a lot of people that only want to use their server for a few hours or days then stop/start again.
By billing hourly people have the ability to get on-demand gaming. Meaning that as long as you have credit on your account, if you or your friends wanted to plan minecraft survival for a few hours or Counter Strike etc... Then you just start the server and play, pay for the hours you've used then delete the server and pay no more until you want it again.
Obviously having a monthly option is also a good idea as some people want a 24/7 game server.
Honestly, I don't think it'd have to be as high as you would think on a VPS.
Yes, you have one more dimension you have to fill a decent percentage of, but to be unprofitable, that dimension would have to be filled under 40% of the time to really eliminate profits.
Granted, that's not considering your merchant fees, your maintenance fees, and how much profit you're targeting.
You could offer to store images (for a fee) so that setup was automated. Big difference between "I can rent a VPS for an hour but I have to spend 30 minutes configuring it" and "it's back to the same state as when I left it". Of course, there would have to be retention rules - it'd be easy to tie up a lot of disk.
Keep in mind that this is pretty much what Amazon, etc. offer. You want to offer 2 CPU, 8GB RAM, 32GB SSD? I can buy that for less than 25 cents/hour at Amazon AWS.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
I like the idea of storing an image. That solves the setup overhead problem.
I was planning on making it possible to store images, so if you decide to 'destroy' the instance you have, you can boot it up again almost immediatly later.