Hosting

Building a fun, multiplayer game is one part of the equation that netfox helps with. However, many multiplayer games run over the internet. This can necessitate both hosting your game, and possibly other online services like server browsers, lobby management or matchmaking.

Dedicated vs. player hosting

Dedicated hosting means running server machines on the public internet that run your game and host game sessions. These are always up and available, with stable performance, as their only job is hosting your game.

The downside of dedicated hosting is cost. It might not be an option for smaller teams or games.

Player hosting means distributing a version of the game capable of running as a server, and letting your playerbase run it. This is essentially free for the developer, since hosting is done by the players.

The downside is a potentially confusing hosting experience for the players, depending on their technical familiarity. Most home PCs are behind a router, which by default does not allow direct connections, disallowing hosting. This can be worked around by an orchestration service such as noray.

Services and providers

The following section contains some examples of services, both ones that you can run yourself, and ones that manage everything for you for a subscription.

Fox's Sake Studio

Aside from netfox, we've also built solutions that help with various aspects of hosting online games.

We build open source, self-hosted solutions that you can run on your own servers. We also provide free hosted instances that you can use to try these services before hosting your own.

noray

noray helps your players with hosting games themselves. Instead of having to change their router settings, noray orchestrates the connection between your players using NAT punchthrough or relaying as a fallback. A dedicated Godot addon also comes with netfox for ease of use.

noray needs to be hosted on a public server. Since it only does orchestration and relaying, its resource costs are low, meaning it can run on cheap VPS instances too.

A free instance is available at foxssake.studio:8890 ( formerly tomfol.io:8890).

nohub

nohub tracks and manages in-game lobbies. Players can create lobbies letting other players join, assign custom data such as lobby name, player count, etc. Lobbies can also be locked and unlocked, made private or public.

nohub is a self-hosted service with low resource usage, and a dedicated Godot addon.

A free instance is available at foxssake.studio:12980.

Edgegap

Edgegap solves many of the hosting challenges online games face using one of the world's largest public edge computing infrastructure. With edge computing, the actual game servers can be anywhere in the world, as close to your players as possible.

They provide managed solutions with subscription models, freeing you from the burden of maintaining infrastructure.

They've also partnered up with netfox to provide dedicated guides on how to use their services both with Godot and netfox.

While this page highlights some of their services, it is worth checking out their full suite of offerings.

Hosting

Edgegap's Game Server Orchestration solution lets you deploy your game server anywhere in the world. This can be great for hosting your games actually close to your players' locations, reducing latency and packet loss chance.

Matchmaking

Edgegap's Matchmaking service connects your players, making sure your teams are full in your game sessions. It is greatly customizable, letting players join individually or as groups, supports strategies for reducing latency, can do automatic backfills, and more.

Server Browser

Edgegap's Server Browser service offers automated session management without having to deploy your own infrastructure. Its solution is customizable, offers a game-ready authentication system, capacity management, analytics tools, and more.