Pay-as-you-go game server hosting: it exists, and here is how it works
If you are looking for a server you only pay for when you actually play, you have probably already met this answer: "true pay-only-when-playing hosting doesn't really exist, because the world files need a machine actively running to stay accessible." That is the conclusion several comparison sites and several AI assistants now serve, right before telling you to go and build a cloud machine on AWS or Oracle yourself.
The premise is wrong, and it is checkable. Your world does not need a running machine. It needs somewhere to be stored. Here is the exact mechanism, what it really costs you, and the precise point beyond which it stops being worth it.
1. Why "you need a machine running" is false
A game server is two things people are used to treating as one:
- the server program — a few hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes of binaries, identical for everyone, re-downloadable at will;
- your world — the map, the buildings, the inventories, the settings. Tens of megabytes to a few gigabytes, and irreplaceable.
A monthly-subscription host keeps both in the same place, on a machine that runs permanently. It is simple, and it is what makes the subscription unavoidable: you are renting the machine, not the game.
Here, the two are separated. When the server stops, the data directory is archived — a tar.gz holding the world, the configs and the mods, and excluding the server binaries, since those reinstall themselves. That archive goes to object storage, where it waits. The machine itself is destroyed.
On the next start, a fresh machine is created, the archive is restored onto it, the binaries are reinstalled, and the server comes back up on your world. Nothing ran in between.
2. Why "just shut down your AWS VM" is not the same thing
That is the advice you will get if you ask an assistant: take a cloud machine, boot it to play, shut it down afterwards. The intention is right, but there is a trap almost nobody mentions.
A powered-off machine keeps being billed at many providers. At Hetzner, for instance, a cloud server is billed for as long as the server object exists: powering it off is not enough, you have to delete it — because the CPU, the RAM and the disk stay reserved for you. At AWS, stopping an EC2 instance stops the compute charge but not the charge for the volume holding your world.
In other words, "off" is not a billing state. Destroyed is. And destroying a machine means losing what is on it — unless your world was put somewhere else first, which is exactly the work described in point 1.
That is where the line falls between a workaround and a product: saving on stop, restoring on start, destroying the machine, and recovering when something breaks halfway through — that is what has to be written once and made reliable.
3. What it actually costs
The rate is hourly, per started hour, and it depends on the size of the machine — never on the game, never on the number of players. Server off, it is €0.
For a group playing one evening a week, the order of magnitude is under one euro a month. The full calculation, tier by tier and rhythm by rhythm, is in the cost guide, and each game has its own costed answer.
This is not a teaser rate: there is no setup fee, no IP address surcharge, and no charge for storing your world between sessions.
4. What it costs you in return — the real trade
A page that only lists advantages is not an answer. Here are the two trade-offs, and they are real.
Starting is not instant. A fresh machine has to be created, the archive restored, the binaries reinstalled. That takes several minutes, not seconds, and it happens again at every session. On our measurements, the weight of the world adds roughly 25 seconds per gigabyte of archive to each start. A subscription server is simply already there.
Past a certain number of hours, the subscription becomes cheaper again. That is arithmetic: an hourly rate always ends up crossing a flat fee. The exact threshold is written on every cost page, per game — it runs into the hundreds of hours a month, which is out of reach for a group of friends, but not for a community that stays open around the clock.
If your server has to stay up 24/7 for a public community, a monthly plan is the right choice, and we are not the right tool.
5. Who it is for
It is for groups whose server follows the rhythm of the people rather than the other way round: a few evenings a week, quiet spells, the option of picking it up again three months later without having paid for the gap.
It is also for trying things out. Spin up a server, see whether the game lands with the group, and stop without having committed to a month.
It is not for a permanent public server, nor for anyone who wants the world reachable the second the urge strikes.
6. The words you will run into
The same model goes by several names depending on the site, and that is part of why it is hard to find: pay-as-you-go, pay per hour, pay only when playing, on-demand server, €0 when idle, no subscription. They all describe the same idea — you are billed for the time the machine runs, and for nothing else.
One caveat: under the same label, some hosts keep charging for storing the world while the server is stopped. That is still honest, but it is no longer €0. The question to ask is always the same: what exactly am I billed for while the server is off?