We’ve been hosting game servers since 2012. WinterNode is the brand we run them under today, and the one we’ve put the work into. Today we’ve hosted tens of thousands of game servers for more than 15,000 customers, across 30 games in 8 locations on 3 continents.
That’s 14 years of hosting game servers, and it felt like the right time to start telling more of this story directly, in my own words.
I’m Brandon, one of the founders of HostVenom, and I run WinterNode. My co-founder Scott has been in this with me from the start and leads our infrastructure. You can meet the rest of the team on our about page.
Where this came from
HostVenom is a New York company that’s been hosting since 2012, and game servers have been part of what we do that whole time. WinterNode is the current brand we run them under: same owners, same in-house team, same standards, pointed at game servers.
So when you spin up a server with us, you’re not renting from a brand new shop that might disappear next year. You’re running on a company that’s been doing this since 2012 and is still building.
Our hardware, and where it’s going
Our data center operations are in Chicago, where we own 100% of our own hardware. That’s the model we believe in, and our goal is to own and manage all of our locations over time. We add locations and scale them as it makes sense for the business and for the value we can pass back to you. We grow deliberately, not to put a bigger map on a page.
The story so far
- 2012 - HostVenom starts up in New York. Game servers are part of what we do from early on.
- 2020 - We acquire WinterNode and make it our game hosting brand, the name we still run under today.
- 2023 - The game library takes off. We go from a handful of titles to a real catalog and expand into Europe and Australia.
- 2025 - I leave my job to run this full-time.
- 2026 - 14 years in: 30 games, 8 locations, 3 continents, tens of thousands of game servers hosted.
Why I went all-in
I didn’t leave my job because this was a sure thing. I left because when you want to provide a service you actually believe in, you need real control over the process, the output, and the outcome. That control is exactly what running this gives me, and it’s what lets us focus on the things that matter and get them right.
What we’re actually focused on
If you ask what our team works on day to day, the honest answer is the customer experience. All of it, all the time.
We want you to reach out when something is wrong. That isn’t a burden for us, it’s how we find the next thing to fix. Every customer interaction is a chance to spot an improvement, and we treat it that way. Things aren’t always clear from the outside, and they aren’t always obvious from the inside either, so in every conversation we’re asking whether there’s something we can do better.
That focus is backed by real, in-house people, about a one hour average first response, across tickets, Discord, email, and live chat. And 99.9% uptime, backed by an SLA. Support is the part customers actually feel, so we keep it ours.
We keep growing the game library, much of it from suggestions in Discord. We try to keep everything manageable, so the experience stays good as we get bigger. We’re thoughtful about how we expand, how we market, and how we grow, and we’re not trying to make our products more expensive along the way. We’d rather compound the value you already get. Every one of those calls is made in the best interest of our customers and the people actually playing on these servers.
Why we build this
At the end of the day, we’re gamers. That’s why WinterNode is such a joy to work on and build. Our goal is simple, and it hasn’t changed: make it easy for anybody and everybody to host a game server.
This is the first of more updates like this. We’re going to keep building, and I’m going to keep writing about it. If there’s a game you want us to host, or something we can do better, tell us in Discord. A lot of what we’ve shipped started there.