Nodecraft

We spoke to the guys at Nodecraft and asked them to complete our questionnaire for new hosts on CompareGameHosting, this is the answers they kindly supplied:

When did you form your game hosting company and why?

Nodecraft launched on May 21, 2012. We began as gamers who were frustrated with our hosting options. We kept encountering the same problems with unreliable servers and misleading providers, and that drove us to create a better solution. With Nodecraft, we wanted to cultivate the kind of experience we’d look for as a customer.

What experience of game hosting did you have before you formed your GSP?

Our team ran various gaming communities which focused on Minecraft as well as various Steam games such as GMod for many years, but hosting servers at the time was a difficult and frustrating experience.

One of these communities, SammyServers, entertained over 10k monthly active players at its peak. Our team still manages and maintains a mod developed for their Garry’s Mod servers, now public nearing 1 million unique subscribers.

What have been the most important lessons you have learnt during your time as a GSP?

In our sector, trust is absolutely essential. Customers often have been burned in the past by providers with less-than-forthcoming practices. The importance of transparency and honesty in our business practice has been something we wanted to emphasize from the beginning, and it has paid off well for us. We hit many of these points on our “the difference” page at our website.

Where do you see your GSP in 3 years time? What does the future hold for your company?

Our company is growing. We’ve released support for a total of 15 games and we plan to continue to add more to our library. In three years, we’re seeing ourselves with an expansive game library that maintains our top-tier service. We’re working on some significant changes that shift our platform from renting specific, tiered resources, and instead offers them access to all games in our library for a simple monthly rate.

What has been your main game? Have you maybe focused on one game and specialised in hosting it?

We launched Nodecraft as a Minecraft-only service, but have expanded out this year into hosting a larger collection of games. Our control panel was originally built to include everything you need to create a Minecraft server, complete with a plugin installer, modpack installer, and much more!

We currently host 15 games, with Minecraft, PixARK, and ARK being our most popular.

How do you handle support in difficult situations?

We handle it with transparency for the user, and prioritize the back end to get the servers back up and running as soon as possible. If the users know what’s going on, they tend to be more understanding. Open and constant communication is key.

What Early Access or young games do you see taking off in the near future?

PixARK has been an exciting up-and-comer for us. Even with it still being in early access, we’ve been seeing promising numbers coming back to us. We’re excited to follow that one through launch. Factorio has also been a promising game. It executes a unique gameplay style very smoothly, and has a very enthusiastic player base even in its early access stage.

Has there been a situation where you have had to deal with a difficult request and how did you respond to it?

As we were growing as a company, the ATLauncher (one of the most popular modpack distributors for Minecraft) were having issues with their server provider and CDN. They had to distribute thousands of files and TBs of bandwidth to users around the globe, and were struggling to do so with their current provider.

We offered to build a custom solution, which sparked the creation of our own CDN, NodeCDN. This was a challenging project for our development team, but today, NodeCDN serves over 3PB of bandwidth to millions of users every year.

Do you sponsor any Twitch/YouTube channels and if so would you like to give them a shout out?

We have several partners! Kehaan, X33N, itslewdicolo and Vash505 are a few. A full list can be found at https://nodecraft.com/community .

Do you offer your customers any free additional services or go further than your competition in any way?

We have our own self-developed control panel for your games, with easy one-click deployment of mods and plugins. With our industry unique save and swap instance system, you can play 15+ different games (with new ones added all of the time), and save and swap to any other game we support. NodePanel features an extremely user-friendly interface that you can access from your computer or with our app, so anyone can successfully start and run their custom server.