Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) are on the rise. These video games combine Role-Playing Games (RPGs) with multiplayer online gaming world elements. Hence, you're playing with global players. Everyone's in it, not just the geeks but non-geeks who love to connect and play together.
The thing is, you need servers to host such games. These servers must be powerful enough to cater to high-demand games to enjoy an optimum gaming experience. A significant part of your experience can lie in the ability to customize the game environment.
That's where game server hosting comes into play. You get complete control over the server and its resources.
Quick Comparisons
1. Google Cloud
Website: https://cloud.google.com/game-servers
Ride on Google Cloud Game Servers with its dedicated game server management. Google Cloud manages and automates game servers across multiple Agones clusters and tracks their health via Terraform. Hence, you do not need to be concerned with downtime, which is essential for seamless gaming. Also, you get fast clock speeds up to 3.8 GHz.
Why Google Cloud Game Servers?
Based on the open source server management (Agones) on Kubernetes, Game Servers allow your multiplayer games to run anywhere compatible with Kubernetes. Also, integrations with other open-source projects, such as Open Match, are possible. Game Servers schedule scaling events and autoscale your game server based on customization rules set by you, a necessary trait when hosting your games.
You can also customize your gameplay experience via the Kubernetes and Agones APIs. Test new rollouts in selected regions to preview the changes before full deployment. Utilize the provided single-control plane to manage your installations. Game Servers also afford manual management of your game server fleets.
Google Cloud's infrastructure is impressive (35 regions, 173 network edge locations in more than 200 countries). Hence, your players enjoy a blazing-speed gaming experience with Google Cloud's globally distributed data centers.
Pricing
Google Cloud manages the first Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster for free, and each additional cluster costs $0.50/cluster an hour. Or you can sign up for the 90-day free trial, where you get a $300 credit. However, you will need to provide your credit card information.
2. Fozzy Game Servers
Website: https://games.fozzy.com/
Based in Delaware, USA, Fozzy Game Servers run with various data center partners worldwide. It also throws its own data center into the ring with a facility in Amsterdam. That makes it one of the most robust solutions providers in the game server market.
What Makes Fozzy a Good Option for Game Server Hosting?
At the moment, Fozzy only offers a handful of professional games. However, it's playing the long game and adding new monthly titles. There are already several popular titles like Minecraft, ARK: Survival Evolved, CS:GO, and ARMA 3.
Fozzy's key hardware partner is Dell, whose 5GHz servers are entirely fielded by the brand. Their staff manages that entirely – no outsourcing nonsense to worry about. However, support is another matter, and it still needs to be determined if this portion is in-house since they field a worldwide support team.
One excellent highlight here is also that their setups are automated. You can get gaming in as little as 10 minutes once you subscribe to your chosen plan. Game server management is also simple, thanks to the Pterodactyl game panel. It's highly intuitive yet provides enough features to satisfy the most demanding of gamers.
Fozzy Game Servers Plans & Pricing
Fozzy prices its game servers according to game titles. On the lower end of the spectrum are Minecraft servers that start at $7.98/mo for 10 slots. That cranks up to Rust servers starting at $23.98 for 20 slots. You can increase the number of slots on your plan and top up prices accordingly.
3. HostHavoc
Website: https://hosthavoc.com/
HostHavoc is another popular choice among many. They specifically focus on hosting games, although they offer web hosting, Intel and Ryzen VPS hosting, and dedicated servers. They promise to maintain and update their game-specific custom tools and features alongside game/mod updates, so you always get the latest.
What Makes HostHavoc A Good Option for Game Server Hosting?
You can choose from 30 games (ARK: Survival Evolved, Conan Exiles, Counter-Strike: GO, 7 Days to Die, Arma 3, Atlas, Garry's Mod, Minecraft, PixARK, and more). Most of their servers run on the latest Ryzen and Xeon E-series CPUs with speeds of up to 4.6GHz and 2x NVMe SSD to ensure speedy and powerful performance. You can install any mod on the Steam workshop, including third-party APIs and plugins.
With their strategically located 10 data centers worldwide (majority in the US), free DDoS protection, and daily backups, they promise above 99.9% uptime, which gives you stable and seamless game time. HostHavoc promises instant setup so you can get into the game fast; your new hosting service can be ready within minutes! You have complete control over your server via their user-friendly control panel and full FTP access.
HostHavoc enjoys raving customer support reviews. Their promised 24/7/365 support means you don't have to worry when you need help. They claim that their average ticket response time is less than 10 minutes. Also, their comprehensive knowledge base helps heaps. If you're targeting the US with Windows hosting, HostHavoc could be it for you.
HostHavoc Plan & Pricing
The pricing differs with the game. Some games charge by the number of player slots, while some, for example, Minecraft, come with unlimited slots. They offer a 3-day money-back guarantee, so feel free to play around. All major credit cards, PayPal, and a wide range of cryptocurrencies are accepted.
4. Hostinger
Website: https://www.hostinger.com/
Hostinger's Minecraft Server Hosting rocks as an affordable Minecraft hosting provider. Their Minecraft hosting plans run on VPS servers, so you get dedicated resources to host Minecraft, essential criteria. You get control over your VPS server via their advanced version of Game Panel with the Debian 10 operating system (user-friendly interface and full root access). Exercise flexibility over your game's settings, upload customs files, and more.
Why Hostinger Good for Game Server Hosting?
All Hostinger's Minecraft hosting plans come with dedicated IPv6 and IPv4 addresses (better DDoS protection and direct FTP file access). Their servers are on terabytes of SSD storage and high-clock speed industry-standard Intel Xeon Processors. Thanks to their RAID-10 technology and automated backups, you can quickly restore your games in no time via the control panel.
Hostinger provides one-click installers for specific plugins and mods. You can also add third-party plugins and mods manually. With servers in the US, UK, Netherlands, Singapore, and Lithuania, you can choose the one nearest to your players to ensure a speedy gaming experience.
It is easy to get onboard Hostinger's Minecraft VPS (they claim to get things moving within ten minutes). Hostinger's support is praiseworthy. To date, they scored a 4.5 in Trustpilot. Also, it is rare to find a web host that crafts their plans surrounding Minecraft; this makes Hostinger a worthy contender (if you're into Minecraft).
Learn more about Hostinger in our review.
Hostinger Plans & Pricing
Minecraft Server Hosting plans by Hostinger start from $6.95/month to $77.99/month. If you are aiming for a small setup, the Alex plan on a Vanilla server with 2 GB RAM and 2vCPU suffices for up to ten users. However, if you need more, check the higher-tier plans such as Enderman, Evoker, or Wolf. Confidently sign up, as they offer a 30-Day money-back guarantee.
5. Vultr
Website: https://www.vultr.com
Vultr is perhaps one of the cheaper cloud game hosting providers around. The Cloud Compute plan allows you to deploy on their Vultr cloud platform and allocate your instances over the selected data center. Then, you scale your infrastructure up and down to suit your game's usage.
Why Vultr for Game Servers?
Whether you require a high or medium-performance infrastructure to support a multiplayer online game, Vultr cloud orchestration instantly gets you up and running. The Cloud Compute instances support CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, and more; they run on shared AMD and Intel CPUs. You can upgrade to NVMe SSD for an additional price.
Select your preferred pre-installed application via one-click apps and use cPanel, CentOS web panel, or others. Vultr's data centers are at 27 locations across five continents, offering minimal latency. Their SLA promises 100% network uptime and host node uptime. There's DDoS protection against layer three and four network attacks. These are essential for maximum uptime.
You get full root access to your files via Vultr's easy-to-use control panel. They have a comprehensive library of documentation to help you self-manage your server. However, if you are not up to self-host, you can check out their sister site, gameservers.com.
Learn more about Vultr in our review.
Pricing
Vultr's pricing starts from as low as $2.50/month for regular performance through SSDs. However, if you require an NVMe SSD, you pay more, starting from $6.00/month. Also, DDoS Protection costs an additional $10/month, where you get an additional 10Gbps of mitigation capacity per instance.
6. Amazon Gamelift
Website: https://aws.amazon.com
Amazon GameLift is another solid choice for game server hosting with its powerful dedicated cloud servers. It manages, operates, and scales its cloud servers to cater to the varying demands of session-based multiplayer games. GameLift automatically adjusts the scale capacity based on your configured steady-state percentage target. Hence, you can meet the fluctuating needs of players with low latency.
Why Amazon GameLift A Solid Choice for Game Server Hosting?
With GameLift, you can connect up to 200 players in a session. Also, there are both Spot and on-demand instances from which you can choose 40 instance types and sizes to get the optimum configuration for your game. You can use containers or integrate with other AWS services (AWS Shield and Amazon Elastic Container Service). Additionally, GameLift's FlexMatch feature matches players based on configured rules that you define.
GameLift supports all major game engines (Amazon Lumberyard, custom C#, C++ game engines, Unreal Engine, and Unity) and cross-platform play mode. The GameLift Real Time Servers support mobile, turn-based, and messaging games, which extend the range of supported game types. There's a management console to help monitor the performance of your game, server capacity and health, and CPU and memory utilization.
GameLift operates on the AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure. As such, it is secure, expansive, and reliable. You get Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection. GameLift is available in an extensive region listing, so no worries about speeds for your global players.
Amazon AWS Gamelift Pricing
You pay as you go when using GameLift. They charge for instances by usage duration and bandwidth by data transferred. Amazon claims that GameLift with Spot Instances and Auto Scaling can help save up to 70% on compute costs compared to servers in a colocation environment.
You can start by signing up for a free tier account and enjoy 125 hours of on-demand instance usage per month.
7. OVHcloud
Website: https://www.ovhcloud.com
The game-dedicated servers of OVHcloud deliver top performance and resilience designed for online gaming. Running on the AMD Ryzen ZEN 2 architecture platform, they facilitate a seamless online gaming experience via efficient management of videos, images, and tasks in parallel with multiple players. They claim that these third-generation processors can help boost performance by up to 30%.
Why OVHcloud A Good Option for Game Server?
Giving you up to 1 Gbit/s bandwidth with data centers across the globe (France, Canada, USA, Australia, Germany, Poland, the UK, and Singapore), your players enjoy a low latency when gaming. Each server has a free 500GB of independent storage space, which should suffice. Also, each server has a public IPv4 and IPv6 address; you can rent more IPv4 addresses (maximum 256/machine) if you need to.
OVHcloud emphasizes security by including robust anti-DDoS protection on all its servers. Unlike most others, it adapts to UDP traffic (for video, audio, and video games) and reviews both ingress and egress traffic. OVHCloud promises 99.90% uptime in its SLA. Recommended games are Twitch, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Rust, Minecraft, Ark, L4D2, and more.
Take note that OVHcloud is intended more for those tech-savvy and advanced users. There has been feedback that their customer service is not up to par. Hence, be on your toes to resolve anything fast on your own.
OVHcloud Plans & Pricing
OVHcloud's pricing is affordable. You can get started with a package for under $100/month, and if you need more, you will have to explore the higher-tiered plans. Despite the unfavorable customer support, there's no denying that you take the good with the bad. Hence, OVHcloud is still a solid option to help get started on a DDOS-protected and dedicated gaming server.
8. Streamline Servers
Website: https://www.streamline-servers.com
Streamline Servers is the go-to game server hosting provider if you want support for many different types of servers. In addition to game server hosting, they offer voice, VPS, web, and dedicated hosting solutions. At times, you may want to host multiple games rather than one; this is where Streamline Servers' dedicated hosting comes in.
Why Streamline Servers?
Their dedicated servers give lag-free and competitive gaming performance, with you exercising control over your servers. The servers primarily run on i7 processors and SSD storage. Although most of their data centers are in the US and Canada, they are widespread in Europe, South America, Africa, Oceania, and Asia, giving you good coverage.
Streamline Servers' network deploys Global Secure Layer (GSL) DoS and DDoS protection. In parallel, they utilize Blacklotus and Staminus for international and NSFocus mitigation appliances for domestic-based attacks. They emphasize transparency, which is why they allow you to view each node's status in real-time.
Streamline Servers' control panel is flexible and helps you to configure your server. The 24/7/365 support quality is commendable with a comprehensive knowledge base makes for a quality game hosting experience. If you need quality dedicated game hosting solutions to enjoy a quality multiplayer gaming experience with a larger community, explore Streamline Servers.
Pricing
The pricing differs by game. For example, while Counter Strike: Global Offensive is priced at $1.00/slot, 10 – 64 player slots, and is available in 22 locations, Minecraft charges $6.00/GB.
Dedicated Game Servers are from $2.50/month, dedicated Minecraft Game Servers are from $3.00/month, dedicated Teamspeak Servers start at $2.00/month, and dedicated servers begin at $150.00/month.
9. Shockbyte
Website: https://www.shockbyte.com
Shockbyte is another go-to game server hosting provider if you're a hardcore Minecraft fan. Although they rent out other game servers like ARK: Survival Evolved, Rust, 7 Days to Die, and more, their specialty is Minecraft hosting, with hundreds of thousands of customers and over half a million hosted servers since 2013.
Why Shockbyte for Game Server Hosting?
They claim that onboarding is breezy almost instantly upon order completion. The modified Multicraft control panel allows you to manage your Minecraft servers easily. Most of Shockbyte's servers run on Intel Xeon E-2236 @ Max 4.80GHz processors with NVMe SSDs in RAID 1. Hence, you won't have to worry about speed issues while playing Minecraft.
Shockbyte promises a 100% uptime guarantee and protection against Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks (guaranteed). That's a mouthful of promises but much welcomed, as documented in their SLA. The Minecraft servers are in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. As such, they promise a low-latency hosting experience.
Shockbyte's Minecraft hosting plans support updated Java Edition and Bedrock Edition. They also support every Minecraft server version and all mod packs, including Feed The Beast, Technic, ATLauncher, and others. Customization is possible since you access your server files via the Multicraft control panel. Their 24/7 global support team is noteworthy, with a complete knowledge base.
Shockbye Plans & Pricing
Shockbyte's pricing starts from as low as $2.50/month (DIRT plan), which gives you 1 GB RAM and around eight player slots (suggested), although the plan affords you an unlimited number of player slots. They accept PayPal, Paymentwall, and Credit/Debit Cards.
You can even create a custom IP with your server name for free. The 72-hour money-back guarantee helps. Shockbyte is a worthy Minecraft hosting provider, especially for newbies.
Wrapping Up
The gaming space is ever-evolving. Hence, gamers who wish to host need to explore new technology offerings to keep up. The above are eight popular game server hosts that you can explore; they offer advanced game server hosting with powerful features and functionalities that ensure you and everyone enjoy an unparalleled gaming experience.
