It's Game On for Shockbyte, the Game Server Provider

Shockbyte provides game hosting services globally and is one of the largest and longest-running Minecraft hosts.

Executive Summary

Shockbyte launched in 2013 as a Minecraft host and quickly grew to one of the largest providers of game hosting services in the world, now also hosting ARK: Survival Evolved and Rust, and with Arma 3 and Hytale in the works. Today, the company has over 160,000 customers and approximately 30 million players around the globe. This company of dedicated gamers and developers knew exactly what they needed for continued growth and success — world-class bare-metal servers, bandwidth, protection, and service.

Challenges

Shockbyte needed to provide gamer hosts worldwide with best-in-class servers at rock-bottom prices and ensure a great gaming experience for end users. Keeping customers’ servers online, with maximum uptime and no latency, required the best, most reliable dedicated servers available around the world, premium bandwidth and a high level of scalability and automation. It also required extremely competitive pricing to align with Shockbyte’s high-volume, low-price subscription business model. Lastly, powerful and affordable (read free) anti-DDoS was absolutely critical for their game server owners.

"OVHcloud had the best DDoS protection we could find — and it’s free. Anti-DDoS is really important in gaming. With our previous providers, anytime there was any size of attack at all, everything would go down. With OVHcloud, we’ve never had any outage due to a DDoS attack."

- Mitch Smith, Shockbyte

Solution Delivered

With OVHcloud, Shockbyte has access to the world’s leading data centers and the power of dedicated bare-metal game servers for maximized bandwidth, uptime and redundancy and minimized latency. Additional servers are used to distribute game software among various nodes and automate updates. OVHcloud API automates specific processes and provides a range of tools to staff and customers. For example, whenever new nodes are added to Shockbyte’s infrastructure, the OVHcloud API detects them automatically and adds them to the monitoring system. Similarly, IPs are automatically migrated between nodes and assigned to customers whenever necessary, virtually eliminating the need for routine network management.

"What’s really great about OVHcloud is they have server locations all over the world — and we’re in all of them now. On the East Coast in Virginia and now on the West Coast in their most recent data center in Hillsboro, Oregon, so latency in the U.S. isn’t an issue."

- Mitch Smith, Shockbyte

Results, ROI, and Future Plans

With OVHcloud, Shockbyte runs on more powerful hardware than any of its competitors and is the only host utilizing NVMe SSDs, which are six times faster than regular SATA SSDs, putting them lightyears ahead of the competition. Shockbyte feels confident in guaranteeing customers full protection against DDoS attacks under their SLA. With no ingress, egress, additional storage or API call fees, and anti-DDoS protection included at no charge, Shockbyte can continue to deliver on its mission to offer premium service at a very affordable price. They can also offer customers the flexibility of upgrading or downgrading servers at any time, and it’s  a completely automated self-serve system. In the future, beyond being virtually global, founder and CEO Mitch Smith would like to have a physical presence in every country and OVHcloud will be there to support them.

Special thanks to Mitch Smith, the CEO and Managing Director of Shockbyte. Mitch launched the company in 2013 as a Minecraft server host and has guided its growth into the largest game server host in Australia and Asia Pacific, serving tens of thousands of clients all over the world.