
Show HN: Custom-Build Factorio Server Hosting Serivce - throwaway110
https://factorioserverhosting.com
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joshstrange
If you haven't tried out Factorio [0] I _highly_ recommend it. It's a great
game and the demo alone was enough to sell me on the game. Don't be put off by
the "early access" stuff, I've sunk hundreds of hours into this game, it is a
blast. In all of that time I've never played online/multiplayer so if you
don't like that aspect you can just ignore it.

[0] [https://www.factorio.com/](https://www.factorio.com/)

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throwaway110
Absolutely true, Factorio is such a wonderful and rich game!

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urthen
I love Factorio, but this is a rather expensive offering compared to other,
more mature Factorio hosts. Quick search reveals other hosts offering 50+
slots for the same price or cheaper than this site's 1-4 slot option, with
better control panel functionality.

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throwaway110
Thank you for your feedback. Have you tried out our control panel, what can be
improved in your opinion? Although I could not find any host which offers 50+
players for $9.99, I would strongly doubt the validity of the offer. It is
simply not possible to maintain a server for 50+ concurrent players for 10
bucks. Maybe the 50+ slots are referring to savegame slots? We at
FactorioServerHosting.com offer arbitrary many savegame slots.

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iDemonix
[https://clients.mcprohosting.com/order/factorio](https://clients.mcprohosting.com/order/factorio)

[https://www.gameserverkings.com/games/factorio-server-
hostin...](https://www.gameserverkings.com/games/factorio-server-hosting/)

~~~
throwaway110
Thank you! Our goal is to provide a smooth and customized multiplayer
experience. Although we want to keep prices low, quality always trumps
quantity in our price making. So lets look at their pricing and make a quick
back-of-the-envelope calculation: 100 slots for $10 => $0.1 per slot per
month. Based on our observations a reasonable minimum RAM usage per slot is
250MB. Thus, in this deal you pay $0.1 for 250MB RAM or $10 for 25GB RAM for a
whole month. Well...this does not seem right. Why, you ask? Simple, the
cheapest AWS instance with only 16GB RAM (r5.large)[0] costs $109/month. To
put this again into perspective: you wont be able to serve 100 players on an
AWS instance which is 11x as expensive and only has 65% of the minimum
capacity. On top of that r5.large is optimized for memory not CPU, so you
would end up with a way more expensive AWS instance to serve 100 players.

Then how can they offer such a deal? Again it's, simple, the quality will
suffer dramatically. You will lose connections, lose game states and have low
FPS. (You can find plenty honest reviews stating this).

Having said that, we aim for customers who are willing to pay a fair price for
an awesome game experience. Our current price is $9.99/4 players/month which
translates to $2.5/player/month. Seems fair to me...

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-
demand/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/)

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throwaway110111
Isn't it possible they are not using AWS? There are plenty of game hosting
services that own their own hardware.

Even if they are using AWS (which personally seems like a poor decision for
this kind of use case), I don't think your pricing comparison is fair. On
demand pricing is the most expensive way to rent AWS servers. Reserved
instances, dedicated hosts, and savings plans can cut the cost you quoted by
~70%. By your calculations that's 100 players for ~$33/month.

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throwaway110
Yes, it is possible that they do not use AWS, but thats not my point. If you
can offer a price which is a fraction of AWS' price (or for that matter of any
other major cloud provider), why bother with gaming? Just sell your capacity
11x cheaper, whereas this is a lower bound for this factor. They should be
able to sell it for even less.

Owning hardware does not make it necessarily cheaper. Most often to the
contrary.

So by your approximation they still make -$23/month?

Either way, we offer a solid Factorio Server Hosting Service, where you do not
have to bother with capacity limitations, resulting lags or an awful
configuration panel. We solve this problems and we offer it for
$2.5/player/month. If you want a smooth gaming experience when coming home
from a stressful workday, we are the right choice. If you dont care for about
the aspects mentioned above and you want to pay a few cents less per month,
you should probably us a different game server host.

Our focus is quality of service.

