Types of machines

Game servers reside on machines of the following types:

  • Bare metal (physical) machines, where the entire host machine is available to you.
  • Virtual machines from a cloud provider, where many machines reside on the same physical host.

Due to the innate differences between bare metal and cloud machines, Game Server Hosting manages them differently. The primary difference between the two machine types is how to configure server density.

Bare metal machines

Bare metal machines (also called bare metal capacity) refer to physical machines that typically reside in a traditional data center and have their operating systems installed directly on the machine’s hardware.

Note: Bare metal is currently reserved for account-managed enterprise customers and must be ordered through our sales team. If your organization is interested in obtaining bare metal for your project, contact a Unity expert.

Cloud machines

Cloud machines (also called cloud capacity) refer to virtual machines that exist in the cloud. Game Server Hosting supports using cloud capacity from several major cloud providers. Cloud machines differ from bare metal machines in that they're typically virtual machines that the cloud provider manages and exposes through an API.