HACKER Q&A
📣 koellewe

Pay-per-Minute Game Servers


Some friends and I are considering starting a pay-per-minute game server hosting company. Our idea is to use a cloud-as-a-service provider and only spin up game server instances as users request them. Thus a user can boot up a game server (e.g. Minecraft/Killing Floor/etc) anywhere in the world and only pay for the minutes it's online.

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?

  👤 mimixco Accepted Answer ✓
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. Also, if you take the money you will be the one providing support -- and there will be support issues because there always are.