Show HN: Grryno.com – A pay-per-use game server hosting service
Hey HN!

I made a pay-per-use, game server hosting service a while back: https://grryno.com/. There are lots of subscription based game server hosts, but as far as I can tell this is one of the first on-demand services.

The initial reason I created it was so that I didn't have to waste time every few months searching up how to get a server running for an old, obscure or open source game (Quake2, Teeworlds, Unreal Tournament, Bitfighter, etc). And because I don't play games as much as I used to I didn't want to pay a monthly subscription anywhere. Hence the on-demand service.

It's a bit more expensive per-month compared to other subscription-based services, but it's not meant to be used 24/7.

The game servers are run using Docker on a handful of AWS services, and the web front-end is running on a Linode instance.

The servers have an auto-shutdown feature which stops the server if it detects no players connected for 10 minutes. This is handy because I regularly forget to shut down the server manually and it prevents running up a huge bill.

It also automatically backs up game save files to S3 each time the server is shut down, features a web-based server console, has an easy config file and plugin editing system and let's you change the cpu/ram profile on a game server at any time.

It basically launches a server through AWS like this:
- The 'Launch Server' button is pressed on the website:
- Space on an EFS drive is created for game save files
- Config files and plugins for the game are saved to the EFS drive
- A DNS entry for the custom domain (eg. myserver.grryno.com) is created through Route53
- An EC2 instance is launched, linked to the EFS drive
- An ECS task (Docker image) is created on the EC2 instance.

This all finishes in about 2 minutes, usually.

So far I only have a very small handful of paying users, but last week I was host to a major Twitch Minecraft charity event with some big-name streamers. It was exhilarating to watch these guys, who had about 100,000 combined viewers, play on my servers. Terrifying too! I could barely watch the stream because I was afraid that my stuff was going to come crashing down at any second and ruin the whole bloody thing. It all ran flawlessly though! I had teamed up with a company called Warp World to do some Twitch-specific customization on a Minecraft server and it was because of them that this Twitch event happened. Many thanks to them for supporting me.

I'm a developer through and through but I'm trying to learn some marketing so I can hopefully quit my day job and run this thing full time soon.

I would love for anyone to try it out and let me know what you think. If you go to https://grryno.com/ and use this promo code: THEBEESAREHAPPY, you'll get a couple of bucks added to your account, which should be about 10 hours of game time for most games with the default server type. I'm open to any and all constructive feedback or suggestions. There are only a handful of games on there right now but I'll add games on request as well.

I'd love to answer any questions on the tech stack or infrastructure too.

Thanks for reading!

Ryan