/case-study
Witchly
A free game-server hosting platform on bare-metal Hetzner. 10,000+ users, bootstrapped, €100/mo infra. Plus the time a 50 Gbps L7 DDoS hit and we recovered in under 20 minutes with zero data loss.
10,000+ Registered users
50 Gbps+ DDoS mitigated
€100/mo Infra cost
$3K+/mo Equiv. AWS cost
Game-server hosting sits in an awkward gap. Free platforms like Aternos and Minehut are severely resource-constrained and unreliable under load. Commercial hosts charge $15–30 per server per month, pricing out hobbyists and small communities entirely. Nobody was offering production-grade, low-latency infrastructure at zero cost.
Witchly was built to close that gap — and to do it on zero external funding. Every architectural decision maximises raw compute per euro so the free tier is economically viable long-term. The full case study below walks through the stack, the DDoS incident, and the cost economics. The PDF renders inline — you can also download it directly.
Stack at a glance
Hardware
Hetzner bare-metal — Intel i9-9900K, 128 GB RAM, 2 TB NVMe. Ubuntu 20.04, in Germany and Finland.
Orchestration
Docker + Pterodactyl. Tenant isolation enforced at the kernel via cgroup CPU pinning and hard RAM limits.
Architecture
Three independently-scalable planes: frontend, control plane, data plane. Game UDP/TCP bypasses the control plane entirely.
Custom dashboard
Built from scratch — server provisioning, native Stripe billing, real-time per-server CPU/RAM/storage, internal REST APIs.
DDoS defence
Layered: Cloudflare WAF at the edge, AS-level filtering at the CDN, host-level UFW + Fail2Ban with default-deny.
Cost
€100/mo for the full cluster vs $3,000+/mo for equivalent EC2 + Shield Advanced. The delta makes the free tier viable.