How it works

A hub for your community

A hub is your community's web hub and its Discord bot, one per community. It runs on its own VM with its own database and its own backups. Nothing is shared with another community. The hub is where members sign in, link their game accounts, see who is playing and look at their stats, and where your moderators work. The bot brings the same things into your Discord.

Three kinds of servers

gravel supports three kinds of servers, and a hub can hold any mix of them.

• Servers we run for you. Game servers on cloud VMs that GRVL provisions and operates. They resize with the player count: a small VM when the server is quiet, a larger one when it fills, and back again.
• Servers you rent elsewhere. Servers at any host, linked over RCON and log feeds. The hub reads players, matches and chat, and your moderators act on the server from the hub. Your credentials stay with you.
• Games with no community server at all. Games that have no dedicated server, or that your community plays on someone else's. The hub still does identity, crews and participation stats, so those games count too.

What GRVL operates

• Provisioning. We create the VM, the database and the hub, and we hand you a working site and a bot to invite.
• Backups. Nightly base backups with point-in-time recovery, kept off the VM.
• Monitoring and alerting. We watch the hub, the database and the servers we run, and we respond when something breaks.
• Updates. Each hub follows a release channel. Updates reach a canary first, then everyone, and we roll back if a release misbehaves.
• A reachable hostname. Your hub is served over https at a name such as yourcommunity.grvl.gg, or at your own domain if you prefer.

What stays yours

• Your data. Members, stats, moderation records and settings belong to your community. Ask for an export at any time and you get a complete one.
• Your Discord. The bot joins your server with the permissions you grant it and nothing more. You can remove it at any time.
• Your game accounts. Members link their own accounts. GRVL holds only what it needs to show that a link exists.
• Your server credentials. RCON passwords and log-feed secrets for servers you rent are stored for your hub only, encrypted, and never used for anything but your hub.

Questions? Email hello@grvl.gg, or request early access.