Show HN: Grryno – Game server hosting by the minute

[rejacobson]

Hey HN!

As far as I can tell https://grryno.com is the first game hosting service that let's you pay for game servers on demand, by the minute, rather than having a monthly subscription.

It's still a work in progress but is functional. The reason I'm showing you now is to try to get people using it so I can iterate on user feedback rather than trying to guess what people would want.

The only game offered at the moment is Minecraft, but I'm open to adding any suggested game servers, even older or open source games. Name it and I'll see if I can do it. Prices of games will be anywhere from $0.05 to $0.25 per hour, depending on the required resources. Minecraft, for example, is $0.25/h because of it's heavy memory requirements. Other, lighter games, such as Teeworlds, would be about $0.05/h

The game servers are run using Amazon AWS services which are managed through a Linode web frontend and backend. I started off with everything on Linode using 4 separate application servers to manage everything. After a suggestion from an old work colleague I made the switch to AWS and Docker which has made things an order of magnitude simpler! I managed to dump about half of my existing codebase and drop all but one application server because of the switch to AWS.

I'd love to answer some questions about the tech stack I'm using if anyone's interested. I'd also love to hear opinions on what game servers people would be interested in running.

Thanks for reading!

Ryan

[chatmasta]

For this idea to work I think you need to auto terminate the instances when no players are online. Otherwise you’re asking your users to remember to terminate the server when they’re done playing, lest they be surprised with a $180 bill at the end of the month.

[rejacobson]

Thanks for the input.

Yes, auto termination is a good idea and on the todo list.

The way payments work is users add funds to their account with a credit card and then run servers. Their account is only debited when the server stops.

So if I add $5 to my account and run a Minecraft server for 2 hours, my account balance will be debited by $0.50. If my account balance runs out then I can't start another server until I add more funds into my account.

At the moment, if a user forgets to stop their server then it will keep running until their account balance runs dry. Which isn't great, and this is where an auto-termination feature would be handy. Perhaps as a setting on the server: "Limit this server's runtime to 3 hours"

[Zekio]

$180 per month seems a bit expensive for just a Minecraft server O.o

[rejacobson]

Definitely, if you were to run the server 24/7.

My target market is the people who don't need to run a server for that long. For example, someone who is busy, but still wants to run a server for themselves and friends/family for a few hours at night every now and then.

Such as my own use-case, where I have kids that I like to play minecraft with but can only manage a few hours here and there because of work and a busy schedule.

If someone wanted to run a server for a month straight I would suggest going elsewhere as that's not really what the service is for.

Thanks for the comment!