Hosting a game server

Hosting a game server means running the server-side part of the game around the clock, so your friends can join whenever they want without depending on one player’s computer. Minecraft is the best-known case, but the same logic applies to Palworld, Valheim, ARK or Rust. Here is how to size it and get started without missteps.

Beyond Minecraft

Every game has its own demands. Minecraft (especially modded or on Folia) is memory-hungry; recent survival games are just as demanding:

• Palworld: heavy on CPU and RAM, sensitive to the number of loaded creatures;
• Valheim: reasonable with a few players, load grows with world size;
• ARK: Survival Ascended: very demanding, substantial memory and disk;
• Rust: needs a fast CPU and a regularly regenerated world.

How much RAM

It is the first reflex, but not the only one. As orders of magnitude:

• Valheim, 2 to 5 players: 4 GB is enough;
• vanilla Minecraft, small group: 4 to 6 GB;
• Palworld or modded Minecraft: 8 to 16 GB;
• ARK: 16 GB and up.

CPU clock speed matters as much as RAM: most of these servers run on a single main thread, so one fast core beats many slow ones.

Latency and location

Latency depends on the network distance between your players and the server. For a European group, a machine in the European Union (our VPS run on Hetzner infrastructure, Germany/Finland) gives a very good ping. Our managed game plans, meanwhile, are hosted on our own hardware in France. Pick the location closest to the majority of your players.

Backups

A lost world cannot be replayed. Set up regular, automatic backups of the world folder, ideally off the game machine. On a VPS, a simple cron script that archives and copies to remote storage already does most of the job. Test the restore at least once: a backup that has never been verified is not a backup.

How to get started

Two routes are open to you:

• VPS: full control, you install and manage the server yourself, any game;
• managed game plan: we take care of the infrastructure, you play.

For Minecraft expertise (anarchy, Folia, custom plugins, Velocity networks), see Minecraft server. For a free-form server you configure yourself, compare our game servers.