Anyone know a good place to host a masterserver?

Unity Engine
1

As title states it.

I am looking for a good place to host a masterserver.
As I’ll develop multiplayer games from now on, I understand that Unity Technologies makes available the masterserver on their machine to TEST, but not really for commercial usage.

Therefore it would be nice to know where we could actually host a masterserver at acceptable pricing.

I allready have multiple webhosting accounts like a dreamhost account for massive webspace and bandwidth, a CIHOST dedicated server for yet another amount of space, but my dedicated server doesn’t allow me to run any looks-like-a-server-software.

Does anyone have an idea where we could easily host a masterserver?

2

Actually the Master Server hosted by Unity Technologies is perfectly acceptable to use commercially. Really, we’re here for you!

3

Ah, so if we publish a commercial game, we may keep connecting to the master server | unity HQ ?

I thought I read somewhere that Unity prefers NOT to do this.

4

If you publish a commercial game, you may keep connecting to the UT master server.

However, I should add that we cannot guarantee the speed for connected clients. If you have several thousand players all connecting to the Master Server at once, you might not want to use the UT Master Server. For smaller operations it is ok but if you’re doing a serious production, then you should probably host your own.

Sorry if I seemed misleading before, Joachim has since corrected me about the speed issue.

5

Hosting depends on your budget. Look around on webhostingtalk.com if you want thorough reviews and comments on any provider. Personally, if you can afford it Liquid Web is the way to go. We have an 8-core machine there and push ~1.2TB/month on all of our projects (although we don’t host downloads at LW). No complaints, 100% uptime, and very proactive support.

Of course, they aren’t the cheapest available either. But with hosting you typically get what you pay for. It all depends what sort of uptime and availability you really need.

6

I may be able to host you… untill you get a lot of ppl playing… You could use it for testing and stuff if you want

7

Has anyone tried to use an Amazon EC2 instance for this? That’s my intention, as soon as I get to that point. Pay as you go, 10 cents/hour, clone off a new instance when you need it.

8

Could you give me a little more info about this Amazon thing ?

9

They just opened the closed beta a few of weeks ago. Pay-as-you-go virtualized server instances and storage. Their payment systems are also cool, and support microtransactions, too.

All the benefits of grown-up infrastructure w/out up front costs.

10

Could you tell me if I can find anything about that at the amazon site?

I followed the link you gave and viewed that site, but thats about web services.

I thought you meant you could use a virtual server or such to deploy for example a masterserver ?

Or am I wrong there?

11

EC2 is a “web service” that allows you to create virtual server instances, on which you can run anything you want. It’s just like a managed hosted linux box (with longer pathnames), and you are root. You can use one of their images, or make your own. Think instantiation of prefabs, but you’re creating/destroying virtual servers as you need them. And you only pay for the time they are running.