Why Aimless?

When choosing a hosting provider for your minecraft server, why would you want to choose Aimless over some of our notably larger competitors?

We here at Aimless are a small and agile team of highly competent software engineers with a penchant for minecraft and all things server hosting. Most of us have spent more time in a terminal than we have with our families.

Our team loves minecraft and whenever we've played together in the past we've always self hosted and have always received comments about how fast our servers are. One day we just said fuck it, let's sell our services. And so began our journey.

Over the course of the next 2 years we hand rolled our hosting platform from the ground up to be performant and secure. By delving deep into the guts of Linux and relying on bullet-proof primatives, we've managed to eek out every bit of performance from our self-managed hardware.

We like to create software for our own benefit. We use our own hosting platform daily for our own needs. This is how we know that other people will love it too.

In fact, we believe in the product so much that we're willing to offer the first month of hosting entirely for free. If you don't like it after a month, no bother. You're free to download your files and go somewhere else. We know that you won't do this, though. The juice is worth the squeeze and of that we can be certain.

The Tech

The most immediately obvious difference between us and our competitors is our gorgeous UI. The frontend for the control panel is seriously sick. We insist on dog-food testing all of our features rigorously before releasing them. You simply will not find another hosting provider that treats their app with the same level of reverence that we treat ours.

We wanted to build the control panel to emulate the feeling of being on your smart phone. Adding, changing and removing services is designed to feel familiar and intuitive.

We spent some time speaking with some expert web designers, ensuring that every last pixel is rendered to perfection- regardless of the screensize of your device. If you're on a desktop, try resizing the window and see for your self. We take every device seriously. Regardless if you're on a 5 year old smartphone or a brand new 4k monitor Aimless will look and feel like you're at home.

We're so comfortable with our UX in fact, that we market tested our platform with our grandparents . After some prompting about what a server *is* (and some lectures on why we don't see them often enough), they were able to grok the platform in less than half an hour.

As our control panel is hand rolled, so too is our entire infrastructure. All of our server configuration, deployment and management is orchestrated automatically using our bullet-proof backend which we purpose built. We utilise some seriously bleeding-edge tech alongside tried-and-tested software techniques utilised in some of the largest online-centric companies in the world.

We can't stress enough just how performant this thing is. From sending the request from the frontend to deploying a fully configured vanilla MC server is less than 2 seconds. Less than 2 seconds. We tested other providers and literally no one got even vaguely close.

Server deploy isn't the only thing that's fast though. Since the main objective is to provide game servers, the game servers themselves should be fast too, right?

Of course they are. With 10+ years of deploying private minecraft servers between us, we've got some skin in the game. Each server configuration relies on tried and tested Java configuration parameters (aikar flags +extra), dedicated hardware provisions (using cgroups) and many other sysadmin tricks we've garnered from hosting enterprise grade web servers in our professional careers.

Almost all web applications need some kind of database. Since our team has a lot of knowledge in this area, we've self-hosted our own fine-tuned DB installation on specific hardware for our DB. It can (and will) handle millions of concurrent requests. Just like all things Aimless, we've built this performant and secure as it comes.

Security is our upmost priority. More than performance, more than UX, security came first.

Considering the quality of our UI and the perofmance of our services, it should not be taken likely when we say that our platform is secure.

We adhere to vigorous OWASP standards at every step of the way. Our in-house security experts have white box penetration tested the platform to its fullest extent and we black box pen testetd with an external expert too.

The results? Conclusive. Full marks on everything. We're actually so confident in our platform that we offer up a lucrative bug bounty program. If you can find a vulnerability in our page, we'll pay you out of our own pockets.

The People

Every business is only as good as it's consituent parts. We here at aimless take this philosophy extremely deeply. We're not only here to make money. We care about this product on a personal level. As such, all of our staff members are extremely dedicated, hardworking and down right awesome at their jobs. Yes I'm biased.

We don't have multiple teams. We have one team that does everything. This means that if a you (a customer) requires human support, you're speaking with people responsible for building the platform. You're not going to get bounced around different departments.

We've spent a long time training AI chat bots on the ins and outs of our platform and even gave them "personalities" that match the tone of individual staff members. We do this because we know that a lot of the time, customer queries can be resolved much faster and easier by an intelligent AI assistent. This does not mean that we're totally reliant on AI to help you if you're in need. No. What this means is that if your query is common and easy to answer, you will be answered much faster and we won't get RSI from typing the same response over and over again.

If your request requires a more human touch, there's an escape hatch built into the chat bot that'll help you get in touch with our team easily. Bear in mind that the response windows for this are adherent to our sleep schedules, and we're all based in the UK. If you're in a different time zone to us, this may have some ramifications as to response times, but we'll always do our best to respond in a timely manner.