By Jamieson Lee Hill, Game Story Writer, February 19th, 2026

Introduction

For most indie game studios, indie game server hosting barely matters during early development.  Local builds work, playtests run smoothly, and player numbers are small.

That changes the moment a game succeeds. Player numbers can spike, logins surge, latency appears, and the infrastructure that once seemed fine starts to crack. Without the right setup, success quickly turns into a technical problem.

This article looks at what hosting and servers really mean for indie games and covers the following topics:

What Is Indie Game Server Hosting?

Indie game server hosting is the infrastructure that powers multiplayer functionality for independent studios. It supports the systems that keep indie game servers stable, scalable, and responsive as player numbers grow. It typically includes:

• Multiplayer game servers
  
  
• Matchmaking systems
  
  
• Player authentication and databases
  
  
• Persistent world infrastructure
  
  
• Real-time networking
  
  
• Cloud or colocation environments

• Global content delivery
  
  

Effective indie game server hosting must balance:

• Low latency
  
  
• High uptime
  
  
• Scalability during player surges
  
  
• Cost control as concurrency increases
  
  
• Geographic proximity to players
  
  

For multiplayer titles, indie game server hosting is not a background technical detail. It is the foundation that determines whether a game survives viral growth or fails under load.

From Article One: Real Founder Perspectives

In Article One of this series, founders from Cultic Games and Tale Era Interactive highlighted a common theme: infrastructure costs matter early.

Can from Cultic Games noted that they currently rely on service providers rather than hosting their own servers. Erhan from Tale Era Interactive emphasised that tools, servers, and storage quickly become real financial pressure points for indie studios.

This article builds on those realities by examining how indie game server hosting evolves as player numbers grow.

Key Indie Game Server Factors Gamers Care About

I started gaming in 1977 and worked in an indie gaming studio from 2021 to 2024. Therefore, as a veteran gamer and professional, I can relate to many of these problems gamers face with the quality of indie game server hosting.

High Latency (ping and lag): As players, we want an instant response. High latency leads to lagging and delayed inputs. Ping is the signal sent to measure the delay. High latency can lead to losing game sessions and competitions, especially in esports, which is highly frustrating to gamers.  Read our Mini-guide on Latency for more information. 

Stability and uptime: As gamers, we need servers to stay online. Crashes, disconnects, and failed logins quickly damage the trust for a gaming brand and player retention can fall as a result.

Fair and consistent performance: We need to know as players that we are experiencing the same conditions worldwide. Desync, regional advantage, or inconsistent performance due to server and hosting issues can feel very unfair.

Fast matchmaking and loading: As players, we expect to get into games quickly. Long queues and slow match starts cause a drop-off in numbers, even for good games.

Who Uses Colocation in the Indie Gaming Sector for hosting and servers?

Indie Studios: Studios with multiplayer, modding ecosystems or persistent worlds often own their servers. However, they may place them in a colocation facility like IP House London to avoid downtime and unpredictable cloud bills.

Publishers: Mid-sized and large publishers centralise infrastructure for multiple titles inside colocation centres to control cost, performance and security.

Third-Party Hosting Providers: Matchmaking platforms, analytics services, game server hosts, and backend solution providers colocate to deliver better performance to indie and AAA clients.

Digital Gaming platforms: The Big Guns like Steam, Epic Online Services, and EA, along with modding hubs, combine cloud, proprietary data centres, and colocation depending on the service layer. This hybrid approach is now shaping the future of indie game server hosting as a more cost-effective approach. 

Gaming Industry Reality: Do the “Big Guns” Use Colocation?

Yes. The idea that major gaming platforms are all cloud-based is a myth. Companies such as Valve, Epic Games, and EA use hybrid infrastructure, combining global cloud reach with their own colocated physical servers for performance and cost control.

The Proof: Valve’s Strategy

Valve’s Steam works documentation confirms that dedicated servers must run within supported data centres, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Valve’s own facilities. In other words, cloud and proprietary infrastructure operate together. This is not a preference. It is service layering.

Cloud handles:

• Logins
• Store services
• Matchmaking

Colocation handles:

• Game physics
• Persistent worlds
• Latency-sensitive workloads
• High bandwidth traffic

Indie studios choosing colocation are not moving backwards. They are following the same hybrid model used by the largest gaming platforms.

Why Indie Games Should Model This Approach

Hosting is a business decision. A cloud-only setup may work early, but as concurrency grows, usage-based pricing and data egress fees can erode margins. A hybrid model balances agility with cost control.

Persistent game logic and databases perform best on stable, colocated hardware. Matchmaking and burst demand scale efficiently in the cloud. Content delivery can be optimised through origin servers and CDNs. Cloud provides flexibility. Colocation provides predictability.

Studios that combine both are better positioned to survive viral growth and operate profitably long term.

The Core Hosting Challenges Indie Studios Face

Sudden Player Surges: Growth That Arrives Without Warning

Indie games rarely grow gradually. Success typically comes in sharp spikes rather than predictable curves. With the power of social media, a Twitch stream, a YouTube review, or a viral clip can bring thousands of players online at once to a server. 

In gaming, concurrency refers to how many players are connected and active at the same time. It is not the total number of players a game has, but the number online right now. This includes players logging in, matchmaking, moving, shooting, and interacting simultaneously. Most early server setups are not designed to cope with sudden jumps in concurrency.

As concurrency rises, servers must handle more actions at once, increasing the strain on the infrastructure. If systems are not built for high concurrency, performance drops, lag increases, and crashes follow. Backend systems are often designed for early access testing rather than mass adoption.

Fragile Early Hosting: Built for Testing, Not for the World

Most indie studios begin with low-cost hosting solutions. These commonly include shared VPS environments, entry-level cloud instances, or temporary local servers used during development.

A VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is a portion of a physical machine shared with other customers. These early hosting measures are affordable and convenient, but performance is limited once demand increases. As players join from different countries, latency will rise, and the stability will suffer.

Scaling Properly So You Can Focus on What You Do Best

"Multiplay Hosting removes the complexity of running and operating infrastructure at scale, so your development team can focus on creating engaging player experiences."

Source: Unity Gaming Report, 2025

The 2022 Unity Report showed that hidden costs often come from developers doing tasks they aren't specialised in. Also, nearly half of indie studios report backend instability during early traction, according to the Unity report. This is due to the infrastructure not being designed for concurrent global activity. Many indie games succeed before their infrastructure is ready to grow globally. 

Managing servers is a full-time job that can distract a small team from their actual craft of making the game. So investing in hosting frees up your team to follow their normal routine roles, doing what they do best, i.e. making great games. 

Limited DevOps Resources: Too Many Roles, Too Few People

Indie studios are small by nature. A team of three to five developers is common, and very few include a dedicated infrastructure specialist. 

DevOps refers to the work of deploying, maintaining, monitoring, and scaling servers. In indie teams, this responsibility usually falls to whoever “knows servers best”, rather than someone trained specifically for the role.

Over time, this creates technical debt. Developers spend increasing amounts of time fixing infrastructure problems instead of improving gameplay, polishing features, or shipping updates. Infrastructure becomes a silent drain on creativity.

Cloud Cost Volatility: When Scaling Becomes Financial Risk

Poor planning in indie game server hosting can turn scaling into a financial risk. Public cloud platforms are popular with indie studios because they are easy to start with and require no upfront investment for expensive hardware. However, cloud pricing is usage-based. As player numbers increase, costs for compute power, storage, bandwidth, and regional redundancy rise quickly. These costs often grow faster than revenue, especially if a game suddenly goes viral. 

As early as 2013, Valve founder Gabe Newell was warning developers that cloud infrastructure becomes significantly more expensive as scale increases. 

"Cloud gaming works until it becomes successful, at which point it falls over from its own success. As soon as everyone starts using a continuous network connection to get its applications, consumer IP pricing is going to go through the roof."

Source: Shack News.com, 2013. 

When Success Hits: Who Controls the Servers?

Once a game proves market demand, hosting decisions shift from technical convenience to strategic business planning. Responsibility for infrastructure usually falls into one of three models.

The Indie Studio: Full Control Through Self-Publishing

Self-publishing studios often choose to retain full control over their infrastructure. This means the studio decides how servers are built, where they are located, and how they scale.

Colocation is a common solution at this stage. Colocation means the studio owns its physical servers but places them inside a professional data centre. The data centre provides power, cooling, connectivity, and physical security, while the studio controls the hardware and software.

This approach offers predictable costs, stable performance, and long-term efficiency, particularly for multiplayer games where low latency is critical.

The Publisher Model: Infrastructure as an Operational Expense

When a publisher is involved, infrastructure is often handled centrally. The publisher pays for hosting, negotiates enterprise contracts, and absorbs operational complexity.

This reduces technical risk for the studio but also limits control over performance decisions, vendor choice, and long-term optimisation.

Platforms and Third-Party Hosts: Convenience With Trade-Offs

Platforms such as Steam and Epic Games handle distribution, authentication, and matchmaking, but they do not host the actual gameplay servers.

Many indie studios rely on public cloud providers or specialised Game Server Hosting Platforms. These options offer speed and simplicity but often become expensive once player numbers stabilise at scale.

Indie Game Servers Case Studies: Infrastructure Under Pressure

Innersloth Studio and their Game ‘Among Us’

Indie game studio Innersloth’s hit game ‘Among Us’ is a useful example of a small operation going viral in gaming and needing robust hosting and servers. At the height of its viral success, Among Us was maintained by a team of just three developers. 

This small indie studio was not prepared for how their game Among Us would explode in terms of DAU (Daily Active Users), climbing up to half a billion players.  The game’s original net-code, meaning the networking logic that synchronises players and game state, was never designed for millions of concurrent users. 

The team was forced to rewrite core networking systems and migrate to a more robust global backend to stabilise the game.  When Among Us blew up, its servers struggled with the volume, and many users couldn’t join lobbies, and others were regularly disconnected mid-game. Partnering with Unity, Innersloth were able to fix their problems.

“The Unity Multiplay team worked closely with InnerSloth to deploy and stabilize their online multiplayer offering, even as millions of players around the world were creating lobbies.”

Source: Unity.com, 18 July 2025 

Iron Gate Studio and Valheim

When Valheim sold over a million copies in its first week, infrastructure demand spiralled high. Rather than hosting every persistent world centrally, Iron Gate released dedicated server files. Gamers chose the dedicated server option to build their own villages with family and friends. The dedicated servers that allowed players and third-party hosts to run their own servers dramatically reduced the backend load while maintaining stability.

In this developer interview, the team reflects on their explosive launch and the unexpected scale of player demand that followed the great success of Valheim.

Eric Barone and Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) multiplayer model, where one player hosts the session for others on their pc. This approach minimises backend costs and infrastructure complexity for the developer.

For the creator, Eric Barone, this was a smart move. It avoided the stress, challenge and cost of running central servers.

The only catch? If the host logs off, the farm goes dark. To fix this, the community stepped in with third-party hosting and "headless" server mods.

These workarounds keep the world alive 24/7, letting friends farm together even when the host is away. It’s a cool example of Barone providing the foundation and the fans building the "always-on" infrastructure themselves. Read more about The Stardew Valley story here. 

Colocation for Indie Game Servers: Key Benefits of IP House London

Protecting Latency in Multiplayer Infrastructure: UK and Europe Optimised Connectivity

Based in London Docklands, IP House operates within one of Europe’s most densely connected network hubs. This provides indie game studios with low-latency connectivity across the UK and Europe. Also, it provides strong peering routes for real-time multiplayer traffic and consistent performance during peak player concurrency. 

The result is smooth gameplay without the lag and interruptions often caused by oversubscribed cloud regions.

Enterprise-Grade Reliability for Live Games: Built for Always-On Multiplayer Environments

IP House delivers Tier III–equivalent data centre infrastructure with fully redundant power and cooling systems, continuous monitoring, and on-site engineering support. This level of reliability ensures uninterrupted gameplay for live multiplayer titles, content updates, and in-game events. 

Physical and Network Security: Protecting Game Code, Player Data, and Intellectual Property

Studios colocating at IP House benefit from secure private rack environments, controlled physical access, and professional data centre security standards. This protects proprietary builds, sensitive player data, and live game services in a way that consumer-grade cloud environments cannot fully replicate.

Scaling Indie Game Servers Without Cost Shock: Infrastructure That Grows in Step With Player Demand

Unlike public cloud platforms, where costs increase unpredictably with bandwidth and compute usage, IP House offers fixed monthly colocation pricing and full control over hardware upgrades. Indie studios can scale from single servers to quarter, half, or full racks as concurrency grows, without sudden billing surprises. 

This means you are fully prepared for spikes in the number of players, in terms of server loads and costs that can spiral out of control on cloud platforms. 

Rapid Deployment With Long-Term Control: Fast Go-Live Without Platform Lock-In

IP House supports fast onboarding of customer-owned hardware, backed by remote hands services for installation, maintenance, and diagnostics. Indie Game Studios retain complete control over their infrastructure architecture while avoiding dependency on proprietary cloud platforms.

Why Indie Studios Move Beyond Cloud-Only Infrastructure

Amazon Web Services is widely used by indie studios during prototyping and early access. It allows teams to rent servers instantly and scale on demand without upfront hardware investment. For discovering market demand, the cloud works well.

However, once player numbers stabilise, priorities shift. Cost predictability, performance consistency, and infrastructure control begin to matter more than rapid experimentation.

Cloud pricing scales by usage. As concurrency grows, compute, storage, and bandwidth costs increase unpredictably. Colocation with IP House offers fixed monthly pricing, avoiding surprise charges during traffic spikes.

Cloud environments abstract hardware. Colocation allows studios to own and configure physical servers, ensuring consistent performance for latency-sensitive multiplayer games.

AWS supports early-stage discovery. IP House supports long-term live operations. For mature indie game server hosting, hybrid infrastructure combining cloud flexibility with colocation stability often delivers the strongest outcome.

Conclusion

Indie game server hosting is no longer optional background infrastructure. Games rarely fail because of creative ideas, but they can fail if the infrastructure cannot handle success. Small teams end up fixing servers instead of improving gameplay.

The lesson is simple. Treat hosting and servers as a business decision, not a technical afterthought.

IP House London provides a stable, low-latency foundation for indie game server hosting once success is proven.

Cloud helps you launch. Hybrid infrastructure helps you last.

Speak to IP House to explore collocation services for your indie game. Fill out the contact form today.

Scale Your Indie Game Without Server Failure. Fill out the Contact Form Below...

Some Key Terms Explained 

Backend: The servers and systems running the game behind the scenes

Concurrency: Number of players connected at the same time

Latency: Delay between a player's action and the server's response

Net-code: The system that synchronises gameplay over the network

Colocation: Owning servers housed in a professional data centre

VPS: A shared virtual server environment

Peer-to-Peer: Players host sessions instead of central servers

DevOps: Managing, deploying, and scaling infrastructure

Scalability: Ability to grow without breaking systems

FAQs

1. What is indie game server hosting?
Indie game server hosting is the infrastructure that powers multiplayer gameplay, matchmaking, and real-time networking for independent studios.

2. What is the best indie game server hosting model for multiplayer games?
Most growing studios use a hybrid model that combines cloud flexibility with colocated infrastructure such as IP House.

3. Do Steam or Epic host gameplay servers?
No, platforms handle distribution and authentication, while studios remain responsible for their indie game servers.

4. Is cloud hosting enough for scaling multiplayer games?
Cloud works well early, but stable concurrency often benefits from more predictable infrastructure.

5. What is hybrid infrastructure in indie game server hosting?
Hybrid infrastructure splits workloads between public cloud services and colocated physical servers.

6. When should a studio consider colocation?
Studios often consider colocation when player numbers stabilise, and cost control becomes a priority.

7. How does IP House support indie game servers?
IP House provides low-latency UK and European connectivity with predictable colocation pricing.

8. Does colocation mean building your own data centre?
No, it means placing owned hardware inside a professional facility like IP House.

9. Why does latency matter in multiplayer games?
High latency creates lag and desync, which directly harms player retention.

10. How can studios avoid infrastructure cost shock after a viral launch?
By planning scalable indie game server hosting early and combining cloud agility with stable colocation infrastructure.

Sources

• Game Developer.com:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/press-release/liquid-web-unveils-high-performance-dedicated-gaming-servers-for-businesses-and-enthusiasts

• Amazon: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/aws-is-how-game-tech-edition-2/
• Innersloth: https://www.innersloth.com/
• Among Us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CermGp8bwFE
• Unity Gaming Report 2025: https://unity.com/resources/gaming-report
• Game Developer.com - Stardew Valley: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-4-years-of-self-imposed-crunch-that-went-into-i-stardew-valley-i-
• Valheim: https://youtu.be/7lo0Pn0CA-Q?si=_Yc9QePyGgr6lDUI
• Cultic Games: https://www.culticgames.com/
• Tale Era Interactive: https://www.taleera.com/#games
• Epic Games: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US
• Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/
• Build an Indie Game Studio Series, Article One: https://www.ip-house.co.uk/exclusive-interviews-running-an-indie-game-studio
• Irongate: https://irongate.se/
• Mini-Guide to Latency in Gaming by IP House: https://www.ip-house.co.uk/a-mini-guide-to-latency-in-gaming-and-why-it-matters

About the Author

Jamieson Lee Hill is the MD for Gold Viking Limited and a Video Game professional. Hill is also a digital marketing strategist, qualified lecturer (DELTA and Cert Ed), certified manager (DMS) and avid article writer. With over 27 years of professional experience in education, business, marketing and video game storywriting, he has a wealth of knowledge and experience.

He works with entrepreneurs, leaders, and professionals, helping them to market their businesses. Since 2022, he has been the principal blog writer for IP House London. Hill also worked in a gaming studio as a Video Game Storywriter from 2021 to 2024 on titles including Heroes Chained, Fortunes of Ventuna and Holy Shoot (PC).