Hi!
It's time for our "Corona statement". I know you've probably read a ton of them in the last days so you know what's going on. This is not about our staff or anything like that, we are fine and at home. I want to give you a quick update on what's going on and explain our current situation.
The last days have been insane for us, our player numbers have exploded, faster than ever before. We've hit 100,000 concurrent players, which is a huge milestone for us. This is all, of course, due to quarantines, laws and especially closed schools. We've been working hard to keep our service up and stable as good as we can and we would love to reach even higher peaks together with you.
But we always have to keep an eye on our revenue. We are 100% funded through ads and as you probably know, the economy, in general, is not doing well which directly affects the ad budgets of lots of companies and therefore also affects our revenue. We still display the same or even more ads but get less for that. We've worked closely with all of our partners in the last days to try to improve our revenue (e.g. through the new ad unit when you start your server) and reduce our expenses (e.g. through the reenabled AFK timeout). Those small measures have helped but still aren't enough for us to cover our expenses. This forces us to implement more drastic measures, especially cutting down our hosting cost by reducing our on-demand cloud usage, which means that we will have fewer resources in total to host servers and therefore expect longer queueing times.
We don't like doing that and we know that you don't like waiting in the queue either, but it's necessary for our company and our service to stay profitable and therefore alive. I know this sounds alarming, but I'm pretty sure that we will get through this. We've saved up enough money and are able to bear the losses of the last and the following days. But we want to take action as early as possible to ensure the stability of our service with as much certainty as we can.
Rest assured that we will continue to work on improvements to increase our service and our revenue and lift the limits again. We reevaluate the situation on a daily basis and decide what we can and can't allow.
In the meantime, we want to say thank you for staying with us in those tough times and wish you all the best.
Stay safe,
Your Aternos Team 💙