DatHost Relaunch – A word from our CEO

A long, wild and bumpy ride

When I first started DatHost 2 years ago, it was as a fun side-project and a way of giving back to the awesome gaming community that I was part of. Not even in my wildest dreams could I imagine the crazy amount of growth that it’d see.

At the time of writing this blog post we have almost 80,000 registered users, and the numbers are growing fast. We receive multiple e-mails daily from people wanting to rent monthly servers, looking for sponsorships, asking us to support more games and more.

During the last 2 years, DatHost has gone from a fun, tongue-in-cheek side-project to a real business, and while that comes with all kinds of challenges, we see them as fun challenges and try not to take ourselves too seriously. After all, we’re gamers just like you.

During the last 6 months, we’ve been working very hard on what we call “DatHost v2”, which is the next step in this great journey that we’re on, and believe me when I say that it is a great step.

Among the things included in this new update is a commitment to helping E-sports, monthly rentals, new website design and control panel as well as a great and innovative new pricing system. Soon™ to come is support for more games (yes, including Minecraft, and for real this time).

Taking responsibility

We’re in a very privileged position with a ton of people having interest in our products. And even if we still consider ourselves to be a very new company, and are first now taking actual steps to turn this into a real and thriving business, it’s important to show responsibility to the people that have given us so much. In a first effort to do this we promise the following:

At least 10% of all profit made by DatHost will go directly into E-sports.

This could be in the form of sponsorships, hosting tournaments, E-sports teams and much more. We love E-sports and see that this is the future. We intend to help get this future here as soon as possible.

Try the servers for free

Anyone who sign ups (or who already had an account) will be given 1 free credit, which enables you to play several hours for free. This allows you to try out our servers before deciding on whether you want to rent one. If you’ve previously been using our servers, you’ll notice a ton of improvements, including:

  1. Much, much more stable
  2. No more issues with server config, passwords, etc, no longer working when changing map or restarting the server.
  3. New competitive configs
  4. Use your own configs and workshop collections
  5. And more

Monthly servers and new system

We now have a brand new system for hosting our servers that we developed in-house. A lot of our competitors use the same system created by the same providers, with the same issues and thus only marginal differences between them. We want full control over our system and the ability to change it on user feedback, and thus decided to create our own.

We’ve also started offering monthly servers, which has been a highly requested feature. However, here we also choose to go our own way, and came up with an innovative new pay-as-you-go pricing system, which ensures that our users pay only for what they use.

Our new pricing system is based on how many slots you have and how long you use the server. For CS:GO, we charge €0.033 per slot, per hour. This means that if you use a 12 slot server for 1.5 hours, we’ll charge you €0.594.

You might compare this to other providers and see that this is a really cheap hourly price, but that it sounds like an expensive monthly price. This is why we have a monthly price cap. Each month, you will not pay more than a certain amount for your server, so after using the server for a certain amount of hours, the server will be free for the rest of the month. For CS:GO, that hour cap is 30 hours, so a 12 slot server would never cost more than €11.88 per month.

We really feel that this gives our users the most flexibility in how they want to use their server, regardless if you just need a server to practice grenades for 15 minutes with your team, or want a monthly server to run clan wars on.

Read more about our great pricing system here.

New website design

Let’s be honest here. The old website design was anything but beautiful. As part of the relaunch, we have an entirely new design on dathost.net, and tools.dathost.net is next in line to get a re-work.

The new design is much, much better and should also provide a greater user experience. The new design comes with a brand new control panel, new logo and a new brand identity.

Now we want your feedback

Please let us know what you think about this update in the comments, on social media or by e-mail to info@dathost.net. We’d love to get as much feedback as possible, so we can get DatHost to where you want it to be as soon as possible.

Anders Ekman, CEO