Managed Hosting (Studio Cloud)

> 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 status badges (provisioning → running) from the dashboard.
• Public play link — the shareable /play/<slug> link resolves to your managed server automatically.

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. Idle servers auto-roll to the latest engine image only when empty (players = 0), so updates never interrupt a live session.

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.