One-click managed game hosting with sharding and optional autoscale.
Managed Hosting
Available in private beta (fleet-capped). Managed hosting lets you put a game online without running your own server. Prefer to run your own box? Self-Hosting on a VPS works end-to-end too.
One-Click Provisioning#
From your project dashboard you can provision a managed game server:
- Pick a plan — each plan includes a server slot; extra servers are available as an add-on.
- ED5 provisions a DigitalOcean VPS for your project, tracked in the control plane, and wires up the public play link.
- Lifecycle controls — deploy, restart, manage the domain, and watch the server's status from the dashboard (see the table below).
- Public play link — the shareable
/play/<slug>link resolves to your managed server automatically.
Server status#
Each server shows its status in plain words:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Queued | Your server is queued and will start setting up shortly |
| Payment needed | Finish checkout to start setting up the server |
| Setting up | The server is being created — usually a few minutes |
| Updating | A deploy, restart, rollback or backup restore is in progress, or the server is switching to the latest version on its own. Players may be disconnected briefly; it usually takes a minute or two |
| Online | Running normally |
| Having problems | Running, but it reported a problem — players may notice lag |
| Maintenance | Maintenance mode is on; players can't join until you resume |
| Suspended | Stopped and not accepting players |
| Failed | Setup or the last change failed — try Deploy latest, or contact support |
| Unreachable | The health check couldn't reach the server just now — it may be restarting or down. The dashboard keeps checking |
Bring-your-own servers show Waiting for setup until their agent first checks in, and Offline when they stop checking in.
Gotcha: servers update to the latest engine automatically. An empty server updates at once; a busy one waits for a quiet moment (few players online, or inside your quiet hours), warns players in game with a countdown, saves the world, and then updates — within the maximum delay you set under Game server updates on your account dashboard. Choose Wait until the server is empty there to keep the old wait-for-empty behaviour. See Game Server Updates. While one of these automatic updates runs the card reads Updating rather than Unreachable, and afterwards the server list shows Updated to the new version and how long ago. Server versions follow the engine release: the first server build of a release is numbered like the release itself (0.6.5), and fixes shipped before the next release count up from it (0.6.5.1, 0.6.5.2, …). The server's Recent activity lists it as Automatic update.
The managed game server runs its own embedded (PGlite) database on the droplet and receives your content through editor → server publish/sync — so it's independent of the database mode your editor uses. Servers update to the latest engine image automatically: an empty server updates right away, and a busy one schedules the update at a quiet moment with an in-game countdown and a full save, so no progress is lost — see Game Server Updates. Security, logging and database settings for a running server live in Game Server Settings.
Your world's data and backups#
Your managed server keeps your world — published content and every player's characters — in a database on the server itself. It is protected in three ways:
- Automatic backups. The server backs up its database once a day and keeps the latest copies on the server. When off-site backups are enabled for your server, each backup is also stored off the server.
- It never quietly resets. If the database is damaged (for example after the server lost power mid-save), your world does not come back as an empty starter world. The server stops the game, shows database failed in its status, and restores the newest backup that opens correctly — usually within a few minutes, with no action from you. Anything that changed after that backup (for example the last hours of play) is lost.
- Clean shutdowns. Updates, restarts and maintenance always let the server finish saving before it stops.
Where to see it: Account → Studio → your project → Server — the server's detail view. Its status and activity feed show:
| Activity | What it means |
|---|---|
| Database backup saved off-server | A daily backup was stored off the server. |
| Database backup saved on the server only | A daily backup was kept on the server; off-site upload is not enabled for this server. |
| Database backup failed | Today's backup did not complete (the reason is shown). The next attempt runs within the hour. |
| Game database failed …; restored the … backup … automatically | The database was damaged and has been restored. Changes after that backup are lost. |
| Game database failed … and no backup could be restored | The world is offline. Contact support — do not re-create the server, which would discard the data we can still recover. |
- A brand-new server starts with a starter world once. After your world has had data, the server will never replace it with a starter world on its own.
- Want your own database? Set External database in Game Server Settings. You then own its backups.
Changing a server's size#
A managed server runs on one of three sizes — Launch Server, Production Server or Scale Server. To move an existing server to another size, contact support: resizing is done by ED5 staff from the same server card, and your world, database and play link stay as they are.
What to expect:
- Players are disconnected for roughly 1–5 minutes. The server is powered off, resized and powered back on; the card reads Maintenance meanwhile.
- Only CPU and memory change. The disk is never grown, so a resize can always be undone.
- A downsize can be refused. A server first created on a larger size cannot shrink below the disk it started with; the resize is abandoned and the server comes back on its old size, unchanged.
- One change at a time. A server can be resized only while it is Online, Having problems or in Maintenance, and not while a resize or a backup restore is already running.
Multi-Server Sharding#
Busy worlds can run across multiple managed game-server processes (shards). Players are balanced across shards, with cross-shard handoff and distributed social features, plus drain/recovery so a shard can be rolled without downtime. The dashboard shows per-project shard telemetry (desired vs. active shard count, max shards).
Autoscale (opt-in)#
You can let a project automatically add shards under load. Autoscale is billed and consent-gated:
- Each autoscale shard costs the underlying droplet cost + $1.00/month.
- Turning it on requires an explicit two-step confirmation in the dashboard and a saved payment method.
- Leave it off and your project never scales beyond the servers you provisioned by hand.
See Publishing Your Game for the end-to-end launch flow.