Platform
Hosting and hardware
Your servers run on Windows hosts that belong to your organization alone. Rent hardware from GameGrid, or bring a machine of your own and onboard it with us.
Dedicated hosts
A host belongs to one organization. Hardware is never shared between studios, and the platform places your servers only on your own organization's hosts.
Hosts run Windows. Each host runs the GameGrid host agent, which is installed with a one-line bootstrap and a single-use enrolment token, runs in the background, and updates itself with signed releases that roll back if an update fails.
The agent reports the host's health every 30 seconds. A host that has not reported for 90 seconds is shown as unreachable, and a group with servers on it is shown as unknown rather than failed.
Hardware from GameGrid
The studio app lists the hardware available to your organization. From there you can:
- Reserve a host while you decide. A reservation holds it for 24 hours.
- Rent it for one of the listed terms.
- Renew it, or turn on automatic renewal, which is attempted from 7 days before the term ends.
- Release it when you no longer need it. Releasing asks you to type the host's name to confirm, and the host is wiped before it leaves your organization.
Which hardware is available, and on what terms, is agreed with each studio.
Pricing and commercial terms: contact us for more information.
Bring your own machine
You can also run servers on a Windows machine of your own. The machine is registered to your organization and joins with a single-use enrolment command, and GameGrid works with you to connect it and verify its resource limits before it takes servers.
Onboarding your own machine is done together with GameGrid rather than fully self-service. Contact us to arrange it.
How servers are placed
When you deploy, the platform picks hosts for every server in the request by checking CPU cores, memory, disk and free ports on each of your hosts.
- Strategy. Each group places its servers with one of:
spreadandpack. Spreading is the default. - All or nothing. If a request does not fit, nothing is deployed, and the refusal names the resource that ran out.
- Unknown is not zero. A host whose capacity cannot currently be read is never counted as having room.
- Room for the host itself. On every Windows host the platform keeps back 2 cores, the larger of 8 GB or 6% of memory, and the larger of 100 GB or 10% of disk.
- Defaults. A game definition that declares no requirements is placed as needing 1 CPU core, 2 GB of memory, 10 GB of storage and 3 ports per server.
Placement refusals
A deploy that cannot be placed is refused with one of these codes: CAPACITY_EXHAUSTED, CAPACITY_UNKNOWN, QUOTA_EXCEEDED, HOST_CANNOT_SNAPSHOT, HOST_LIMITS_UNVERIFIED, RESOURCE_CAP_UNAVAILABLE, INVALID_AFFINITY and BANDWIDTH_QUOTA_EXCEEDED.
Ports
Every server receives its own block of ports on its host, taken from the lowest free block and released when the server is deleted:
| Port | Protocol |
|---|---|
| game | UDP |
| query | UDP |
| rcon | TCP |
A game definition can name further ports of its own.
Resource limits
Memory, CPU rate and process-count limits that your game definition declares are enforced on the host when the server starts. A definition that declares no limits runs without them.
Organization limits
GameGrid sets limits for each organization as part of your agreement. You can see them in the studio app; the platform enforces these: Instances, vCPU cores, Storage (GB), Rented hosts, Bandwidth (GB/month), Backup storage (GB), Log storage (GB), API requests/min, Concurrent jobs and Concurrent uploads.
To change a limit, contact us.