Server owners obsess over uptime and latency — rightly so. But the metric that quietly decides whether a live server is a business or a hobby is cost-per-CCU: how much you spend to keep one concurrent player online.
Right-size, then autoscale
Most fleets are provisioned for peak and idle the rest of the day. Autoscaling around real concurrency — with headroom for events — routinely cuts spend by a third without touching the player experience.
Profile the expensive paths
A single inefficient query or a chatty broadcast can dominate your bill. We treat cost like latency: measure it, attribute it to code, and optimize the worst offenders first.
You can't scale a business on infrastructure you don't understand. Every dollar of spend should map to a line of code.