A Conversation About Hell Let Loose: Vietnam
The History of HLL Hosting
When Qonzer entered the Hell Let Loose hosting market, a 100-slot server commonly cost between $80 and $130 USD per month depending on the provider. Customers often had little visibility into the hardware they were actually using, how resources were being allocated, or what was causing sweeping performance problems. Communities were left trying to determine whether the issue came from the game, the network, the hardware, or the provider.
Qonzer had its own problems when we entered the market. We quickly identified Path.net (which every provider used at the time) as a major factor in poor performance in Hell Let Loose. We addressed these issues quickly, identified network conditions that were affecting Hell Let Loose performance, and rebuilt our infrastructure around qNet (now qGuard). From there, we continued investing in bringing the latest hardware online, faster networks, better monitoring, and more transparency for you, our customers.
Today, Qonzer operates Hell Let Loose infrastructure at a much larger scale and that same principle was extended across every game we provide services for. Our competition in the market has also been a major factor in bringing the entry cost of a Hell Let Loose server down from well over $100 per month to as low as $35.30. At launch, our price was $54. The average customer now spends around $56 per instance. We offer the cheapest Hell Let Loose package available to our knowledge at $35.30 monthly not including a gateway fee. With this, you are still on a 7950x or 9950x. The cheapest when we started was $86 for the same package as our Level 2 which didn’t include the ability to deploy on a 7950x or 9950x.
The Rollout
Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is being deployed on the best infrastructure globally, on our own network, and available with qGuard DDoS Protection most of you already rely on. These systems are being set aside specifically for Hell Let Loose Vietnam and will not be shared on any other title to include Hell Let Loose (WWII).
We are currently deploying over a hundred of these servers globally, with additional machines being brought online as reserve stock. During that process, the cost for these systems increased from roughly $200 to more than $1,200 just for the RAM on one machine. This does not include any other components or the deployment cost. Hardware availability also became much tighter. Even with the relationships we maintain with our infrastructure partners and extremely low deployment costs, sourcing this number of high-end servers has become difficult and expensive. Our costs have more than tripled since May.
The commitment, however, has already been made. We sourced the machines, continued the deployment, and are bringing dozens of new servers online each day.
Why Qonzer Was Chosen
Qonzer has always allowed customers to choose between different resource packages, and we are clear about what those packages provide. We do not advertise high-end processors and then quietly move customers onto lower-tier hardware or oversold nodes. If we tell a customer that a package runs on a certain specification of CPU, that is the hardware we will provide and you the client can see this hardware directly with our stats provided in the control panel.
That approach is part of how Qonzer has operated from the beginning. We have generally focused less on maximizing profit from each individual server and more on keeping the service sustainable while continuing to improve the hardware and network behind it. When scale or lower operating costs create savings, we have always passed those savings on to customers.
There is also a basic economic limit to what any provider can offer, specifically with UE5 based games. A company cannot sustainably deploy hundreds of servers on equivalent dedicated high-end hardware, provide the same resource allocation, and charge substantially less without making tradeoffs somewhere. Those trade-offs may involve different processors, heavier resource sharing, or other workloads running on the same machine. Customers should ask what hardware they are actually receiving and how that hardware is being allocated. The numbers still have to make sense.
Other Providers and Hell Let Loose Vietnam
We have also had multiple reports and confirmed ourselves that during the leadup to the launch of HLL:V that several providers are incorrectly claiming that they will be offering HLL:V at a lower price than us on their original hardware. There is only one provider for the launch of HLL:V, and that is Qonzer.
There are strict limitations to the hosting around HLL:V and with server costs rising significantly at OvH, Reliablesite, Interserver, Hetzner and many others it wouldn't work. To be clear we do not use the above providers but we know the majority of our competitors use them almost exclusively. A 9950x at Reliablesite is around $330, at Interserver it's $600, while a few months ago these were $200 and $190 respectively.
In the current market, a company would have to host more than 20 instances on that single machine at $30 to just cover the costs of the machine in the best case above. $30 was the lowest price that a client told us he was being offered a Vietnam server from another provider for. For reference, we identified the absolute maximum number of HLL:V instances we can put on a single 9950x server. They would have to more than double the maximum number of instances of HLL:V for the machine to break even.
It doesn't add up and it's simply not possible. We have been working for months on securing the specific hardware that we have guaranteed for HLL:V, and this is why we are having to lock our packages for HLL:V to the UltimateOC.
Why Ultimate OC
Ultimate OC was selected because testing showed that it provided the resources Hell Let Loose: Vietnam required while still making a rollout of this size sustainable. The decision was based largely on CPU processing performance, CCD cache behavior, and analytics collected during the first and second playtests. We looked at how the game behaved under load and where the processing demand was falling. Based on those results, Ultimate OC was the package that made the most sense for the game. It was a technical decision based on the data we had available, not a financial one. If the data points to the game running on a Level 3 or lower package without issue, we will add it to the package list for Vietnam.
Before the rollout began, we also made a specific promise to the HLL community. Qonzer would not raise Vietnam pricing before launch, during launch, or immediately after release. Then the economics changed drastically. Infrastructure costs tripled overnight, hardware became nearly impossible to source, and the rollout was already underway. Raising the price would have been the simplest and most reasonable response:
We chose not to
Qonzer accepted the added cost and continued with the hardware plan already announced. The price was not changed. We continued to deploy on the machines specified. The rollout continued. The customer price stayed the same.
We made a commitment on both pricing and hardware before launch, and we kept it.
Like any game launch we participate in, our promise to the developers and publishers is simple: We will communicate to you exactly what challenges we (may) have, what our system is and is not capable of, and give a complete and exhaustive list of our size, scope and capabilities.
For our customers we promise to be as transparent and reasonably priced as possible. We promote performance over profit as a core decision making metric. We will never attempt to make a quick buck and leave you with a problem to fix.
Still, with the recent backlash on the package price we felt it necessary to address this concern. The price did not change, and we believe we are the sole reason that the hosting companies for Hell Let Loose are at the price they are.
