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Trevor Godley avatar image
Trevor Godley asked

Is the minimum monthly cost $145 to use dedicated servers?

I am on the free tier, and I'm a novice developer, developing a very small multiplayer game starting with around 10 players and I'm hoping to grow from there. As a result, My server requirements are very minimal, but even with all server settings turned to the minimum (Dasv4 2 cores, 1 standby server, max 1 active server) it seems like my monthly costs will be ~$145/month (2 cores * 31 days * 24 hours = 1488 core hours - 750 free hours = 738 hours * $0.1965/hour = $145). I accidentally left my testing server on and was slapped with a $100 bill right off the bat.

Am I missing something? If not, that is prohibitively expensive, and disappointing from a company that brands itself as being for games of every size.

multiplayer
10 |1200

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JayZuo avatar image
JayZuo answered

For the 750 free hours, it is core hours. When calculating, you will put the cores into count. But when estimating cost, you do not need to multiply the cores as different instances already have different price. For example, when using Windows system, the price of D2asv4 is $0.1965/hour, while for D4asv4 is $0.3929/hour.

In your example, the cost will be (31 days * 24 hours -750/2 free hours) * $0.1965/hour ≈ $72.5.

To reduce the cost, I'd suggest you shut down your sever when there is not enough player. Also, you can consider only open the server in a specific period (e.g. 8:00 PM - 2:00 AM) and in other time, set the standby server and max server to zero to control the cost.

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Trevor Godley avatar image Trevor Godley commented ·

So, in summary, the minimum cost to keep one server running is $72/month? This is still prohibitively expensive for my small project.

I just checked out the settings you mentioned. Took me several minutes to set up rules to have the server shut off 12 hours every day. Is there a faster way to do this other than making 7 different overrides, one for each weekday? And will I have to do this every time I upload a new build? This is still a bad solution to my problem, since it will discourage potential new players if they want to play outside of the hours of operation.

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JayZuo avatar image JayZuo ♦ Trevor Godley commented ·

I'm sorry this cost is still too expensive for your project. However, the 750 Dasv4 core hours usage per month is already the maximum we can offer for free. Please note, we offer the free evaluation capacity in two regions. So, if you use the capacity in both regions one by one, then it would be able to cover your usage.

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