Hey HN!<p>As far as I can tell <a href="https://grryno.com" rel="nofollow">https://grryno.com</a> 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.<p>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>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.<p>Thanks for reading!<p>Ryan
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.