PebbleHost
icône 1

54%
saving per terabyte of storage

 

40-50% reduction in costs

80%
cost savings, compared to other GSPs on the market 

2,000+ hosting accounts

150
countries served across the globe

The background

PebbleHost entered the world of online gaming in 2017, and now delivers a wide range of hosting services to customers in over 150 countries, with hundreds of servers around the world, racking up around two petabytes of usage every month. As a game server provider (GSP), PebbleHost offers both bare metal and VPS hosting, tailored to the most demanding gaming applications, such as Minecraft and other sandbox games.

The challenge

Gamers – from enthusiastic hobbyists to seasoned professionals – can be the most demanding of users, expecting seamless, responsive performance, with zero downtime. PebbleHost therefore needed to find a technological partner with the modern hardware and network capabilities required to offer their users fast, smooth and reliable gameplay, for an affordable price. Although every game and business is unique, today’s games largely use RAM rather than CPU power.

PebbleHost were therefore looking for exceptional RAM performance, plus blazing-fast SSD disks and a capable CPU – all within budget. PebbleHost began their search by trialling different providers, but repeatedly experienced poor reactivity from support and unreliable hardware. This included frequent failures and faulty components that took up to two weeks to replace. These factors, along with an unsatisfactory price point, led PebbleHost to look elsewhere…

The solution

PebbleHost

PebbleHost started by investing in hard-disk-based “So you Start” dedicated servers in OVHcloud’s Canadian datacentre. However, they soon upgraded to servers with ultra-fast SSDs and the latest processors and components, adding extra resources in one of the group’s datacentres in France. Later, as part of their ongoing expansion plans, PebbleHost extended its footprint to OVHcloud’s Sydney datacentre, opting for servers from the latest range: Advance.

Indeed, while the business was initially drawn to OVHcloud’s exceptional price/performance ratio, they have stayed for more than just good value, and their infrastructure now comprises 300 servers across Canada, France and APAC.

Support, Scalability, Simplicity

One of the most important parts of a great gaming experience is low ping and low latency. When it came to their expansion plans, PebbleHost were aware that Australian gamers often struggled with their connections to elsewhere in the world, unlike those in Europe and North America. OVHcloud’s Australian datacentre was therefore a huge advantage, as the company was able to provide their APAC users with great connections, simply by adding new servers in this region.

Support over the phone was absolutely brilliant and it really stuck in my head that the support team actually cared and wanted to get a resolution. 

Dan Jackson, Managing Director, PebbleHost

The gaming industry is strongly impacted by seasonality and like all GSPs, PebbleHost must be equipped for these fluctuations. Interestingly, just as they upscale very well, to meet growing demand across the globe, they can also shrink their operations, to accommodate troughs.

Indeed, instead of spending hours deploying and managing servers manually, PebbleHost are able to add and delete resources quickly and easily, via the OVHcloud Control Panel

As soon as we shrink, we can cancel servers for that month, but if we grow, we can order more servers straight away. 

Dan Jackson, Managing Director, PebbleHost

To further simplify the administration, PebbleHost has taken advantage of the OVHcloud API in order to sync their pre-existing billing with the OVHcloud billing system, which has streamlined the process of renewing servers and maintained a level of consistency that their customers have appreciated.

The result

Thanks to the ongoing partnership with OVHcloud, PebbleHost are able to come in at 80% cheaper than the competition on the game server provider market, while offering the same (or better) exceptional customer and end-user experience. The partnership continues to evolve, and plans are already in place to expand to OVHcloud’s west-coast datacentre in the USA, deploying new servers to accommodate a growing customer base.