Don’t know if this Reddit is the best place to ask this but here we go.

I’m the guy in my friends group that always hosts servers for us whenever we want to play some games where dedicated servers are just better.

Sometime in December we wanted to play Ark and I’ve done many servers for Ark in the past but I’m kinda wondering if it’s cheaper to tun a dedicated computer 24/7 just for the server or if it’s better to pick a hosting service?

Nitrado would cost 12€ for 30 days. Is self hosting cheaper?

  • midniteslayr@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    The biggest issue that you’ll run in to with multiplayer servers will mostly be internet related. Games are very demanding (ARK included) on internet connections and most residential connections will have latency issues due to ISPs throttling connections on residential lines. Even small business internet connections aren’t ideal for hosting large games at any length.

    With all of that said, yeah, you could probably host your own server on your own internet connection for you and like 10-15 friends. The more action heavy the game is, the less you can host before the latency and overhead become an issue. Action heavy titles (like sports titles or first-person shooters) are super latency sensitive and each player exponentially adds to the requirements needed for running a smooth game.

    • Nuuki9@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      This is a bit of a generalisation. I’m currently staying somewhere with awful Internet (6mpbs upstream) and I’ve still been able to host dedicated servers for Valheim, Conan, Minecraft and even Astroneer, which is pretty basic in server options. Now these aren’t huge player counts - maybe 6 or less, but that’s probably pretty typical for a small gaming group.

      Of course more bandwidth is great, and no doubt some games are much more bandwidth intensive on the server side, but I wouldn’t discount the option to self host just because you’re not rocking a lot of bandwidth.

      I will add that I have configured my network to aggressively manage buffer bloat, so latency is very good - that no doubt helps a lot, but is of course something that a lot of people can do, depending on the features in their router.