Hi!
The last weeks and months were a tough time, for you, for us and for the entire world. As you might know from our last announcement the global pandemic hit us hard and we even had to cut down our costs causing long queueing times. This led to us rethinking our work and discussing ways to avoid such a situation in the future. But before announcing our solution and our next big step as a company we want to make this clear: Aternos is financially stable again and has recovered from the crisis. Aternos will stay Free. Forever.
We've learned a lot in the last 7+ years that we are running Aternos and built a platform to run game servers on demand on a massive scale. Often users came to us and wanted more from us, bigger servers, better performance etc., which is simply impossible for free. Many users were even willing to pay and demanded from us the ability to pay for their servers. Eventually, those users left Aternos and switched to a paid hosting provider. We want to offer a solution to those users but were never interested in building another 24/7 host, there already exist hundreds if not thousands of providers offering that. Instead, we took what we've learned over the years to build something that we personally love and decided to build a new, second platform for high-end on demand game servers.
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of exaroton - the only paid game server host where you don't have to waste your money when you don't need your server. On exaroton, you only pay when your server is online and you can automatically shut it down when nobody is playing. Your server is, of course, saved in-between your sessions. Read more about it and get started on our website:
You will probably notice that exaroton is pretty similar to Aternos since they are both based on the same infrastructure and software. While the physical machines running the game servers are separated between the two projects, they share many parts of the core infrastructure. This allows us to develop and improve both projects at the same time as well as boost exaroton with stable and experienced technology from the first day on. We strongly believe that Aternos will profit from this as well and it actually has already. In the last months, we have restructured large parts of our system and added features (e.g. domains) in preparation of this launch. While both projects are very close technically, we want to keep both projects independent financially. exaroton users will not pay for Aternos users, Aternos is completely funded through ads and will continue to offer the maximum of what is possible for free. Aternos is not a trial version of exaroton and exaroton is not the "premium" version of Aternos.
With all that said, we hope you are as excited about this as we are and we are looking forward to your feedback and ideas. However, bugs may occur and things might not work perfectly yet. We are just slowly launching exaroton today and will try to get everything smoothly running in the next days and weeks.
Your Aternos & exaroton Team
