Simple and scalable game server hosting

DigitalOcean provides cost-effective, scalable game server hosting solutions so you can build your game quickly and scale up as your game and business grow. DigitalOcean’s simple and intuitive tools, low bandwidth pricing, and robust community enable you to focus on growth while we focus on infrastructure.

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How DigitalOcean can help your game reach new heights

Simple game server hosting built for lean teams

DigitalOcean’s simple UI, CLI, and API enable small teams to get started quickly without the need to learn and manage complex infrastructure tools.

Predictable, low pricing to help you scale

Our transparent pricing model, industry-leading price to performance ratio, and low bandwidth pricing enables you to scale your network-intensive game without worrying about unexpected costs.

Robust product offerings to support your growth

DigitalOcean includes all the cloud products game builders need, from Premium CPU-Optimized virtual machines that give your game fast and consistent performance, to Load Balancers, Virtual Private Clouds, and managed Kubernetes.

Resources to remove development roadblocks

Our community tutorials, documentation, and personal customer support mean you’re supported throughout the testing, development, and scaling of your game.

Game builders finding success on DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean has supported game builders at all stages of their growth, from founders just starting out to rapidly scaling businesses serving thousands of concurrent users.

“We've been trying out new Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets for the last several weeks and we're impressed with the performance gains. So far this is the best DigitalOcean solution we can recommend for high CPU load scenarios and for high network throughput.”

Igor Boyko

CTO, Chill Gaming

The fact that it’s so easy to configure, administrate and scale with DigitalOcean is something which I love. I’ve worked with Kubernetes before, hands-on, self-hosted, but the DigitalOcean integration and provision of Kubernetes has been the most seamless that I’ve experienced so far.

James Hooker

CTO, Hack the Box

Our game would not have been viable without DigitalOcean’s low pricing - our costs would have been 8x higher. It would be much harder for our game to make sense financially and maybe would have to shut it down.

Diego Rocha

Software Engineer Manager, PlayKids

How DigitalOcean helped PlayKids support hundreds of thousands of online players

PlayKids creates high-quality educational gaming solutions and mobile apps for kids. Their library of over 3,000 videos, books, and games give kids the chance to learn from their favorite character.

How DigitalOcean powers their business: PlayKids faced several challenges as they grew. They needed to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent players all over the world while maintaining a cost-effective infrastructure and automating as much as possible.

They achieved this by leveraging DigitalOcean Droplet virtual machines and Managed Kubernetes and to be able to scale up and down easily, and automated their deployments so they could keep costs low while still delivering a good experience for players.

Tools to help you build and scale your game

DigitalOcean provides all of the game server hosting solutions that game builders need, from compute to Kubernetes. Build your game from the ground up using our highly customizable Droplet virtual machines, or get a fully managed infrastructure solutions with App Platform, our Platform as a Service offering.

Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets

Virtual machines with high network throughput and powerful performance.

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Resources for building a successful game

DigitalOcean’s technical tutorials, product documentation, and library of resources can answer common questions about building and scaling your game.

Tech Talk: Modern Game Server Infrastructure in the Cloud

Building large-scale infrastructure for a multiplayer game is not an easy feat. In this webinar, Diego Rocha – Software Engineering Manager at Playkids – discusses how a small team at PlayKids leveraged DigitalOcean Kubernetes to build PlayKids’ infrastructure to reliably serve millions of players.

Tutorial: How To Install pygame and Create a Template for Developing Games in Python 3

This tutorial will first go through installing pygame into your Python programming environment, and then walk you through creating a template to develop games with pygame and Python 3.

Why many network-intensive services run on DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean has proven especially popular with companies developing network-intensive apps because we charge only ~10-20% of what other clouds do for bandwidth. The savings can easily add up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for apps that require large scale.

FAQs

What game server hosting is right for me?

DigitalOcean offers a variety of solutions for building and scaling your game. Droplets are our flexible, scalable virtual machines. They support Linux applications and are fully customizable to your needs. Droplets start at just $4 and can be scaled vertically by adding resources to your Droplet, or horizontally by deploying multiple Droplets in one data center or across our 14 global data centers. You can add storage and other features to complement your Droplets. App Platform is our fully managed Platform as a Service offering, which allows you to easily spin up a static website or application without having to manage the infrastructure yourself. This solution is ideal for those who want the benefits of DigitalOcean without maintaining their own infrastructure. DigitalOcean also offers Managed Kubernetes for containerization solutions and Managed Databases including MongoDB and MySQL.

How much does your game server hosting cost?

DigitalOcean’s pricing is transparent and predictable, and we offer some of the lowest bandwidth pricing in the industry. You can get started with a Basic Droplet for just $4 a month, and be confident that your pricing will stay predictable even as you scale with flat pricing across data centers. DigitalOcean’s App Platform provides you with hosting for 3 static sites for free, and our Basic plan starts at $5 a month. View our full pricing chart here.

What are 1-click Marketplace apps?

The DigitalOcean Marketplace allows you to build your websites faster with preconfigured, 1-Click Apps for popular content management systems including Wordpress, Plesk, CyberPanel, Ghost, developer tools such as Docker and Dokku, and databases such a MongoDB and MySQL. These 1-Click Apps are preconfigured environments with all the prerequisites you need to get started, saving you time on your website hosting.

What support do you offer?

DigitalOcean offers every customer free support through our ticketing system - you’ll get a response from a member of our Customer Support Team who can help you with any questions for no extra charge. In addition, DigitalOcean provides a vast array of documentation and tutorials on how to get started with our products, programming languages, and more.