Server.pro

Carl Atashkadeh started Server.pro in Gothenburg in 2009, with the ambition of creating a different kind of game hosting business. Server.pro hosts all kinds of games, from Minecraft and Terraria to Left 4 Dead and CS:GO. Carl kick-started the business, bringing André Malm onboard a few years later as technical support, having originally met him in college.

“It shows our age, but I remember Carl putting a note on his Facebook wall saying that he was starting a business and needed help,” André commented. “I looked at it and joined over the summer in 2013, intending to take it on as a summer job – then ended up as CTO. It was interesting, but there were a lot of things to do, so I got involved fixing things up and never really left.”

Carl and André’s vision for the business was to create a custom system rather than using a pre-existing game hosting platform like multicraft or pterodactyl. “Ultimately, we provide servers for gaming, but we wanted to make the panel from scratch, which would allow us to create a fully customizable system, without limitations.” André continued. “Small touches make a difference, and off-the-shelf solutions just won't cut it.”

André and Carl looked at a number of different hosting organisations, originally choosing a blend of providers before switching everything over to OVHcloud. Server.pro runs a freemium model, with a 2 GB / 2 core / 5GB disk server being available for a limited time as a free demo. From there, hosting starts from $5 per month.

The gaming sector is often plagued by denial-of-service attacks, and the duo needed a hosting provider than could not only offer a solid performance at a compelling price, but that could also protect from DDoS attacks – without substantially adding to the price.

“When you’re working with gamers hosting their own servers, you need it to be slick and affordable,” André continued. “But you also need protection because if servers start going down, then you’re going to lose players quickly. We don’t invest a lot in marketing and depend on word of mouth, so it’s critical that we have good reliability and uptime.”

After reviewing performance and the competition, Server.pro switched its estate over to OVHcloud, using dedicated GAME servers with 128Gb memory and SSDs. The team also uses OVHcloud’s SoYouStart server range, which includes lower-performance, affordable servers that offer re-used components from OVHcloud’s core ranges. Finally, there are four core servers and eight file servers and to maintain the database, website and customer backups.

“We found that OVHcloud offered a good ratio between performance and price,” André continued. “We wanted to keep servers affordable for our customers, but we also wanted the best performance to make sure the games run in the optimal way! OVHcloud also had great anti-DDoS without additional cost, which was important for us.”

Server.pro currently has around two hundred and fifty bare metal servers with OVHcloud in locations around the world. Since starting work together in 2013, Server.pro has started over eleven million gaming servers, including the free demo servers.

“We want to help Server.pro be the best it can be,” said Elaish Amin, OVHcloud. “We’ve been really happy to give the team the support they need, when they need it, and it’s been great collaborating closely with them over the years. They’re good people with a brilliant business empowering game hosts and gamers around the world and we couldn’t be prouder to work with them.”

“We’ve been with OVHcloud for around eleven years now, so I think the results speak for themselves,” André said. “We have essentially no downtime and we don’t have any of the DDoS issues that we had with other providers. The performance/price ratio has stayed solid, and although we’re pretty independent, if something needs to be changed, we can get it changed. OVHcloud’s bare metal servers work really well for us – we can retain full power and control of the server without worrying about DDoS.”

From a small, thousand-customer organization, Server.pro has scaled dramatically, seeing a peak of over twenty thousand customers during the pandemic. The company has also been able to bring new offerings to market beyond gaming, including web hosting and database hosting. The team is also looking at ways to help improve the gaming experience, including a way for players to buy in-game items without friction, which will allow the customers to monetize their gaming.

“Minecraft is definitely the biggest game for us, but we’re constantly looking at ways to make life better for the hosts and players without interrupting them,” André said. “We’ve scaled from a team of one – Carl – to around nine people working for us in total. As a startup, it’s a huge weight off your shoulders when you can actually have a team and you don’t have to do everything yourself.”
In future, Server.pro is also looking at offering domain names, and the growth and industrialization of the business has freed up time for the ever-entrepreneurial Carl to start thinking about his next venture: the in-bathroom privacy smart device Loodio.

“If we were constantly worrying about uptime and attacks, then we wouldn’t have been able to grow the business as much, or explore new areas,” André concluded. “We’re very happy to keep offering the best, most affordable service to game hosts, keeping gamers gaming without interruption.”