Indifferent Broccoli delivers game hosting at scale with OVHcloud® Bare Metal

Key Takeaways:

• Scaled from ~200 to more than 30,000 active game servers per month
• Zero customer capacity turn-aways across four global regions during Palworld's record-breaking 1.0 launch
• 150,000+ game servers hosted across more than 30 titles since 2021

Client: Renting hardware instead of owning it to ride out gaming's biggest waves

Indifferent Broccoli hosts private game servers for those who want to play survival titles, such as Minecraft®, Palworld®, Project Zomboid®, Satisfactory™, and Valheim®, with friends. It's like renting a beach house instead of building one: rather than managing their own hardware, customers rent a private space to build their world, whether that's a Viking castle in Valheim or a fortified base in Palworld.

Founded in 2021 after acquiring the existing hosting business 7d2dserverhosting.com, Indifferent Broccoli has since hosted more than 150,000 game servers across more than 30 titles. The company doesn't own any of its own hardware. Instead, it rents bare metal from providers including OVHcloud to manage the boom-and-bust cycles that come with new game launches and major updates.

Indifferent Broccoli has used OVHcloud servers since 2021. Although the company has diversified across several bare metal providers to support its growth, it consistently returns to OVHcloud as the foundation of its infrastructure, growing from around 200 active servers a month in its early days to more than 30,000 today¹. 

Challenges:

Game server hosting lives and dies by unpredictable demand. Indifferent Broccoli's biggest challenge is handling the sudden waves of new customers that arrive with a game launch or major update, and then spinning down machines and rebalancing capacity once the wave passes.

That challenge came into sharp focus with Palworld®. The game's initial launch, and later its 1.0 update, each sent demand soaring. During the 1.0 launch, concurrent Steam® players for the game across the industry grew from a daily peak of about 50,000 to nearly 1 million. Every game server provider was racing to keep up, and Indifferent Broccoli needed to secure bare metal capacity across several international regions almost overnight.

Solution:

Indifferent Broccoli runs on OVHcloud® Bare Metal, choosing configurations that optimize for price-per-gigabyte of RAM. OVHcloud and Indifferent Broccoli’s relationship has grown gradually over years as the business has scaled, with OVHcloud's technical support team available throughout to promptly resolve hardware and network issues along the way.

“OVH® is not always the cheapest, but it's consistently affordable and able to scale with me during major launches and updates.”
— Jake Gaba, Founder, Indifferent Broccoli
 

Results:

The clearest measure of success shows up in Indifferent Broccoli's inbox. Any time a customer tries to launch a game server but fails due to a lack of available capacity, the company gets an automatic email notification. Before scaling up with OVHcloud, those emails were common; for example, during a Palworld surge, the founder was seeing hundreds of these emails per day.

When Indifferent Broccoli's go-to hardware configuration sold out during that surge, OVHcloud helped identify alternative machines available across Indifferent Broccoli’s required regions. The result: across the West Coast and East Coast of North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Indifferent Broccoli did not have to turn away a single customer for lack of capacity during the record-breaking 1.0 release of Palworld in July 2026.

 “OVH® has consistently provided great technical and procurement support. I feel comfortable emailing at any time, and I know I'll get a prompt, informative response.”
— Jake Gaba, Founder, Indifferent Broccoli
 

The founder also points to bare metal as an underappreciated option for scaling infrastructure:

“Bare metal is a hidden secret. When most people hear “server hosting” they think Amazon®, Google®, and Microsoft®, but if you're IT-savvy, you can have more control and reduce hosting expenses tremendously by renting bare metal machines.”
— Jake Gaba, Founder, Indifferent Broccoli

What's next

As a next step, Indifferent Broccoli plans to keep expanding support for new and legacy survival crafting games. Alongside that infrastructure growth, the company is building bOSS (broccoli Open Source Software), a set of free tools that let gamers host their favorite games on their own hardware, and developing its own in-house game studio, starting with a single-player adventure game before moving on to its own survival crafting multiplayer title.

1 OVHcloud is a registered trademark of OVH SAS. Minecraft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Palworld is a registered trademark of Pocketpair, Inc. Valheim is a registered trademark of Iron Gate AB.
2 Steam is a registered trademark of Valve Corporation.
3 Amazon is a registered trademark of Amazon Technologies, Inc. Google is a registered trademark of Google LLC. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.