Honest Answers

Hearth Hosting provides always-on server infrastructure for Foundry Virtual Tabletop. Instead of running Foundry on your own computer — dealing with port forwarding, keeping your machine on during sessions, and players being unable to access the world between games — we run it on a dedicated server 24/7.

You get a unique subdomain (like curse-of-strahd-4f2a.hearthhosting.com) that you and your players can access any time, from anywhere.

Foundry Virtual Tabletop is a separate product sold by Foundry Gaming LLC. A license costs $50 one-time at foundryvtt.com and is yours to keep forever, regardless of which host you use.

This is how all Foundry hosting providers operate — including The Forge and Molten Host. We provide infrastructure, Foundry provides the software.

After signing up, your Foundry server spins up within seconds. Click your world link and Foundry will prompt you to enter your license key on first login. That's it — no terminal commands, no configuration files, no technical setup.

• Sign up at hearthhosting.com
• Click your world link from the confirmation screen
• Enter your Foundry VTT license key when prompted
• Start building your campaign

Yes. Only the Game Master (account holder) needs a Foundry VTT license. Players join through your world link and access the game through their browser — no purchase, no download, no account required on their end.

License activation happens directly between your browser and Foundry Gaming LLC's servers — the same process as activating Foundry on your own machine. This is identical to how The Forge and other established Foundry hosts operate.

Your license key belongs to you. We only provide the server environment for it to run in.

We take security seriously. Here's what's in place:

• Passwords stored using bcrypt hashing — we cannot read your password
• All traffic encrypted via HTTPS/TLS
• Cloudflare DDoS protection on all endpoints
• Rate limiting on login, signup, and password reset endpoints
• Payment data handled exclusively by Stripe — we never see your card details
• Security headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options) on all pages

Only you and the players you invite. Each Hearth instance is isolated — your world data is completely separate from every other user's. We don't access your campaign content, worlds, or assets for any purpose.

Your data is stored on Contabo infrastructure located in Germany and is subject to GDPR protections. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

We believe in transparency about our infrastructure:

Each Foundry instance uses approximately 150-200MB of RAM. This means we can comfortably support 40-50 concurrent active instances before reaching resource limits. As Hearth grows, infrastructure scales with it.

Foundry VTT sessions are typically small — a GM and 3-6 players. The actual concurrent load per instance is low. Even with dozens of active worlds, the server handles the load comfortably.

We monitor resource usage actively and will scale infrastructure before performance degrades. Mythic tier subscribers receive priority resources.

Custom domain support is on our roadmap. Currently all instances use a subdomain in the format your-world-name.hearthhosting.com. We'll announce when custom domains become available.

Genuinely free — no credit card required, no trial period, no hidden fees. The free Adventurer tier gives you a real, always-on Foundry instance with 2GB storage.

The only condition: your instance is removed after 30 consecutive days of inactivity. If you're actively running games, your world stays alive indefinitely. We'll send a warning email 2 days before any removal.

Free tier users also see a single tasteful advertisement on their dashboard. Upgrading removes it.

Your account moves to the free Adventurer tier. Your world stays online as long as you use it within the 30-day inactivity window. If you were on Mythic and had backups, those remain accessible for 30 days after cancellation.

You can export your Foundry world data at any time through Foundry's built-in export tools — your campaign belongs to you regardless of which tier you're on.

Yes. Annual billing is available at a significant discount — Legendary drops from $8/month to $5/month equivalent ($60/year), and Mythic from $12/month to $9/month ($108/year). Contact support to switch billing periods on an existing subscription.

We handle refund requests on a case-by-case basis. If you're unhappy with the service, contact us at [email protected] within 7 days of a charge and we'll work something out. We'd rather have happy customers than disputed charges.

Foundry VTT has built-in world export tools — you can download your entire campaign as a zip file from within Foundry at any time. If Hearth ever shut down (there are no plans for this), we'd give subscribers at least 30 days notice and keep exports accessible.

Because you own your Foundry license separately, you can move your exported world to any other host — or run Foundry locally — without losing anything.

Mythic tier instances are automatically backed up every night at 3am. We keep the last 7 backups — about one week of daily snapshots. From your dashboard you can see all available backups by date and restore to any of them with a single click.

A restore stops your instance, replaces the current world state with the backup, and restarts — taking about 30 seconds total.

Inactivity is measured by visits to your world subdomain. Any time you or your players access your world, the inactivity timer resets. You don't need to run a session — just visiting the world link counts.

We send a warning email 2 days before removal. Paid tiers (Legendary and Mythic) have no inactivity limit. Paid tiers (Legendary and Mythic) have no inactivity limit.

Storage limits depend on your plan:

• Adventurer (Free) — 2GB
• Legendary — 10GB
• Mythic — 25GB

Storage covers everything in your Foundry instance — modules, systems, worlds, assets, and uploaded media. Your dashboard shows your current usage and remaining capacity in real time.

Here's exactly what happens:

• At 80% usage — you receive a warning email so you can free up space or upgrade before hitting the limit
• At 100% of your limit — you receive a notification email. Your world keeps running. You have 48 hours to reduce storage by removing modules or assets from within Foundry VTT, or by upgrading your plan
• After 48 hours over limit — we begin removing your most recently installed modules sequentially until you're back under your limit. Your world data, characters, and assets uploaded directly to your world are never removed

The easiest fix is to uninstall unused modules from within Foundry VTT, or upgrade your plan for more headroom.

Media-heavy modules are the biggest culprits — particularly animated asset packs like JB2A, large music libraries (Tabletop RPG Music, Michael Ghelfi), and high-resolution map packs. A single animation module can exceed 10GB on its own.

If you're running content-heavy modules like these, Mythic tier (25GB) is the right fit. Free tier (2GB) is suited for lighter setups — core rules, a few quality-of-life modules, and your own campaign content.

You can always check module sizes from within Foundry's module management screen before installing.

Yes — always. You receive an email at 80% capacity, another when you hit 100%, and the 48-hour grace period gives you time to act before anything is touched. We also send a confirmation email after any automatic cleanup listing what was removed.

We never delete worlds, character data, or assets. Only modules — and only the most recently installed ones first, giving priority to your established content.

Abuse prevention is a real challenge for any web service — it's not unique to us. Here's what we have in place:

• Email verification required to keep an instance beyond 48 hours
• Rate limiting — maximum 5 signups per hour per IP address
• Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA on signup — invisible to real users, blocks bots
• Cloudflare DDoS protection, WAF rules, and bot filtering
• Storage quota enforcement — instances over their limit are flagged automatically
• 30-day inactivity removal clears unused instances automatically
• Terms of Service violations result in immediate account termination
• Any content involving the sexual exploitation of minors (CSAM) is reported immediately to NCMEC and relevant law enforcement

Foundry VTT itself requires a valid $50 license to activate — this creates meaningful friction against throwaway abuse accounts.

Hearth Hosting is operated by Rinquist Holdings LLC, an Arizona limited liability company. It was built by a Foundry VTT user who got tired of the self-hosting friction and wanted something simpler for the community.

We're a small operation — which means you get a real human response when you contact support, feedback is heard and acted on, and the product is built with genuine care for the people using it.

Questions or concerns: [email protected]

AI tools were used in the development of Hearth Hosting — the same way a developer might use Stack Overflow, documentation, or any other tool. The infrastructure, decisions, and accountability are human.

The code runs on a real VPS. The payments go through Stripe. The emails come from a real domain. The person responding to support tickets is a real person. The product either works or it doesn't — and if it doesn't, we fix it.

We launched publicly, received community feedback within hours, and shipped fixes the same day. That's the track record so far.