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How to reduce game hosting costs and improve latency

How to reduce game hosting costs and improve latency

Hybrid game hosting i3d.net
i3D.net
Content Team
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9 October 2024

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To provide a low-latency multiplayer experience for your players without blowing your budget on hosting, you require an optimized game hosting strategy. Hybrid game hosting has proven to be the most optimal way to host your game, which not only reduces your game hosting costs but also improves latency for your players. Sound too good to be true? Let’s explore how it works.

Why choose hybrid game hosting?

  • You want to lower game hosting costs, so you can focus on game development.
  • You want to avoid reliance on a single provider and reduce the risk of downtime.
  • You want to improve latency for a smoother player experience.

Benefits of hybrid game hosting

In this approach, you combine dedicated game servers with public cloud services, taking advantage of best of both worlds. Let’s dive deeper into main benefits of this approach for gaming companies.

Reduced game hosting costs​

While fully cloud-based hosting is scalable, it comes with eye-watering bills, often catching game studios off guard, especially once their game starts gaining some popularity and initial start-up credits dwindle. In contrast, hosting on dedicated servers has proven to be the more cost-effective hosting alternative. Hybrid game hosting allows you to run your core player base on dedicated servers, which reduces hosting expenses drastically, while using the cloud to handle player spikes. This ensures server resource availability and scalability without overspending.

Goodbye downtime

With hybrid game hosting, you can mix and match the providers of your choice, making you less dependent on a single provider and helps circumvent vendor lock-in. If one provider experiences downtime, your game can automatically switch to another, ensuring consistent availability. This not only keeps your players satisfied and your game always online but also helps avoid the high costs associated with downtime, such as lost revenue, emergency support, decreased player retention and potential lost reputation. 

i3D.net servers can scale with any major cloud provider, including Azure, AWS, GCP, and Tencent.

Broader coverage and lower latency

To deliver the best multiplayer experience, you need to place servers as close to your players as possible, supported by the right low-latency network. However, no single provider can cover every location or maintain low latency in every region, realistically, each provider has strengths and limitations. For example, public cloud providers with multiple regions often lack adequate coverage in places like Latin America or the Middle East. Bare metal providers can face similar issues, struggling to serve certain regions effectively. Hybrid game hosting addresses this by combining the regions and strengths of multiple providers, allowing you to position servers closer to your players, resulting in reduced latency and greatly enhancing the overall player experience.

i3D.net’s 60+ handpicked locations are strategically placed near key player hubs and emerging gaming markets such as the Middle East (see how we reduced latency by 80% there) and Latin America. Paired with top cloud providers, you can deliver lower latency and improve performance globally.

Better resource utilization

Dedicated servers help reduce costs by eliminating the virtualization overhead associated with cloud hosting, ensuring that your servers’ CPU, memory, and other resources are fully available for your game. This efficiency allows you to make better use of your hosting environment and accommodate more players on the same server instance, optimizing resource utilization and lowering the overall number of servers needed. As a result, studios can save on hosting expenses while still delivering a reliable gaming experience.

Our customers report up to 60% better CPU and memory efficiency when compared to fully cloud-based hosting.

Your advantage with i3D.net

Game hosting on the 2nd most interconnected network in the world

While you can usually optimize major cloud provider’s network for better player experience, this requires technical knowledge and service fees (read more about it in our blog). i3D.net has addressed this from the start by building its network specifically for real-time data transfer. Meaning that players’ data packets always take the shortest, most efficient route, providing users with the lowest latency—without extra costs or technical expertise needed. 

To ensure the most optimal route, i3D.net has established connections with  9000+ peering and 100+ IXP partners, making our network the 2nd most interconnected in the world (read our press release for more information).

Unbeatable bandwidth costs

Owning and operating our own global backbone and network, gives us more control over the bandwidth pricing. That’s why our bandwidth prices are up to 10X cheaper than your average provider which supports your title’s growth without having to worry about bandwidth costs. Feel free to contact us for detailed pricing. 

How to get started

To enable gaming companies to get a firsthand experience of hybrid game hosting, i3D.net offers a free testing environment for a period of 90 days – no strings attached. 

During these 90 days you get a full experience of hybrid game hosting, our low latency network, DDoS protection, game server orchestrator, along with a free CDN account for instant game build distribution. 

For GameLift Anywhere customers, i3D.net offers a seamless integration in this test environment which requires absolutely no changes to your Gamelift Anywhere backend.

Get started with hybrid game hosting
Main Take-Aways

Hybrid game hosting offers a cost-effective strategy that reduces hosting expenses while improving latency for players. This approach allows game developers to efficiently manage player spikes and ensures high availability, minimizing downtime by reducing reliance on a single provider. By leveraging the strengths of multiple providers, hybrid hosting results in a smoother multiplayer experience.

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