Running Unity Asset Server on Amazon EC2 for Free

Community Showcases
1

A few months back I started to look for hosting solutions for Unity Asset Server. I looked at a bunch of the top tier providers of Virtual Private Servers and eventually discovered that Amazon is running a special where you can run a micro instance EC2 for a year for free. I’ve been using it for over two months now and I’m super happy. There were a few gotchas in the otherwise simple setup process so I made a tutorial to help others navigate the process. You can check it out here: Using Unity Asset Server on Amazon’s EC2 | Thomas Grové's Blog

After the first year you are charged hourly, which still ends up being super reasonable, especially if you don’t leave it on 24/7. It would be sweet if someone could write an editor extension that interfaces with Amazon’s API so that users could start and suspend the server with a click of a button in Unity.

2

Excellent tip and guide! Thanks for that.

Did you find any cheap alternatives?

3

no, other than running your own server at home or your office if either your team is working out of the same office or if you have fast upload speeds. But free for one year seems pretty cheap to me! Even after the free year, I don’t imagine it would cost more than $20 a month for most projects. One cheaper solution would be if Dreamhost offered Unity Asset Server as a one click install. That would be like $15 a month for unlimited usage. But 1) Keli from Unity would have to submit it to them and 2) it is probably to niche for them to care.