EC2 Alternatives for Windows Server

Posted by Culbrelai@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 13 comments

So I'm trying to host a game server.

It cannot be locally hosted so needs to be cloud.

It must be Windows.

Does not need a gpu or basically any more CPU resources than to run windows server smoothly. Maybe 4-8GB of RAM and 4 CPUs or so. I find EC2 to be incredibly complex, with way more granular control over things I do not need, and rather expensive.

Needs to be 24/7/365 uptime.

What are the alternatives, that ideally are more user friendly than EC2, and cheaper? I've seen Linode but that's linux only. Got any suggestions?

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Culbrelai@reddit (OP)

Thank you for all the replies everyone, and super fast too. Bunch of gigachads. Gave me a lot of options to check out. Cheers

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nuttertools@reddit

lowendtalk

For a game server what matters most is latency. EC2 is dead simple for the price but the big cloud providers are probably all way more reliable and redundant than you want to pay for. You’ll need to add the region for any suggestions to be appropriate. There are companies that do game servers specifically but you’ll be paying as much as EC2, granted with a dead simple management interface.

I’d probably give honorable mention to OVH as they have a decent global coverage and are cheap.

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JeanneD4Rk@reddit

Get a Linux box and create a windows vm with qemu

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Spiritual-Yam-1410@reddit

If you don't need AWS level control EC2 is overkill. Check out Vultr, Kamatera, or even OVHcloud all offer windows instaces and more predictable pricing👍

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JBD_IT@reddit

Amazon Lightsail would work just fine in place of EC2.

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MegaThot2023@reddit

Can you tell us what game? What about DigitalOcean?

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Adam_Kearn@reddit

I would recommend Digital Ocean too just for the simplicity and easy to understand price structure if you are not already familiar with AWS.

Alternatively hetzner have some good offers on sometimes.

But be aware unless you choose dedicated you will be getting what’s called “shared CPU”. This is basically multiple other VMs running off the same CPU so performance might not always be optimal but it’s a fraction of the cost so it’s a lot cheaper.

Depending if this is something you want todo for a long time it might also be beneficial to look at the cost of a “co-location hosting”. This is just a company that you can send a desktop/server to to host for you.

They provide the network and power you just have to provide the hardware.

This might work in your favour if you are doing this for a long time as the costs are a lot cheaper than renting a VPS.

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Tex-Rob@reddit

This, there are a zillion game hosting companies, there is no reason to go about it on your own OP. If it was extremely lightweight, sure, you could, but it's almost always better to go through a game hosting service.

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PDQ_Brockstar@reddit

I think you can run Windows on Linode, it's just not supported. You'd have to rely on community guides and community support.

Have you looked at Vultr or Hetzner?

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