Managed servers
Provision game servers on your own Hetzner account, straight from the dashboard.
Managed servers let you provision game servers without renting a box first. You connect a Hetzner Cloud account, pick a region and a size, and HiveScale creates the server, installs the SDK, and joins it to your network. To the rest of the platform a managed server is just a server: it registers on its first heartbeat, joins matchmaking, and carries player data like any box you run yourself.
Preview. Regions are limited and per-network spend reporting is still on the roadmap.
Bring your own Hetzner account
The server lives in your own Hetzner project, not ours. You connect your account once with a Hetzner Cloud API token, and from then on every managed server is created under your account. That means:
- Root access is yours. SSH in, take snapshots, resize, or rebuild the box exactly as you would a server you rented by hand.
- Billing stays with Hetzner. The VPS appears on your Hetzner invoice. There is no HiveScale hosting markup, because we are not the ones hosting it.
- We only create and connect. HiveScale provisions the box, wires the SDK to your network, and tears it down when you ask. We never touch the rest of your account.
Hetzner is the first supported provider. The same bring-your-own-account model is planned for more clouds, including OVH and AWS. See the roadmap to follow along or vote it up.
Connect your account
- In the dashboard, open Network settings -> Cloud and paste a Hetzner Cloud API token. A read/write token scoped to a dedicated project is recommended.
- We validate the token and list the regions available to your account.
- The connection is stored against your network and reused for every managed server you create.
Provision a server
- On the network’s Servers board, choose Add server -> Managed.
- Pick a region and a server type. We suggest a size from the server’s expected player count, which you can override.
- Confirm. HiveScale creates the VPS in your Hetzner project, boots a pre-warmed image with the SDK already pointed at your network, and the server registers on its first heartbeat, usually within a couple of minutes.
The new server shows up in your activity feed before the dashboard finishes its spinner. From there it behaves like any other box: see Server registry for presence and transfers.
What stays yours
| Yours | HiveScale handles |
|---|---|
| The Hetzner account, project and bill | Creating and destroying the instance |
| Root / SSH access to the VPS | Installing and wiring the SDK |
| Snapshots and the underlying machine | Registration, matchmaking and player data |
Still in preview
This is shipped narrow and honest rather than wide and vague. Today that means a limited region list and no per-network spend reporting yet. For the background on why it works this way, read Managed servers, in preview.