How to host an ARK: Survival Ascended server on your own PC (complete guide)

Published July 16, 2026

You want an ARK: Survival Ascended server for you and your friends, running your rules, your rates, and your mods. This guide walks you through every way to get one, including the completely manual route, and is written for people who don’t run servers for a living.

There are three ways to do it:

Rent a server from a hosting company. Easiest, but you’ll pay every month, forever.
Run it yourself on a Windows PC. Free (minus electricity), but you do all the setup, and there’s one networking catch that stops a lot of people cold. We’ll cover it honestly.
Use a guided platform that turns a spare computer into a managed server. This is what we build, so we’re biased, but we’ll keep the pitch short and at the end.

Route 2 is the heart of this guide. Even if you end up picking another route, knowing what’s involved will make you a smarter shopper.

What you need before you start

ASA is a heavy game, and the server is heavy too. Before you spend an evening on setup, check the machine you’re planning to use:

RAM: 16 GB minimum. A live ASA server with a few players routinely uses 10 to 14 GB on its own. With 8 GB it will crash or crawl. 32 GB is comfortable.
CPU: anything from a gaming PC made in the last 8 years or so is fine. ASA cares more about single-core speed than core count.
Disk: at least 40 GB free, more if you plan on mods. An SSD makes load times and restarts much nicer.
Internet: a wired ethernet connection to your router if at all possible. For a group of 2 to 20 friends, ordinary home upload speed is enough.

One more thing worth saying up front: hosting the server and playing the game on the same PC at the same time is rough. The client and the server each want a mountain of RAM. It works with 32 GB, but if you have a second machine, use it. A spare desktop or an old gaming PC in a closet is the classic setup.

Route 1: Rent a server

The zero-effort option. You pay a hosting company, they hand you a control panel, and your server exists within the hour.

What it costs: for ASA, typically $15 to $30 a month depending on player slots. That’s real money over time. Two years of hosting is $360 to $720, which is more than the spare PC you could’ve run it on is worth.

When renting makes sense:

You don’t have any spare hardware, and buying some doesn’t appeal to you.
You’re running a big public community server that needs to be up 24/7 with support you can yell at.
You want to try ASA hosting for one month and then stop.

The downsides: the monthly bill never ends, you’re often sharing hardware with other customers (rubber-banding at peak hours is common), and you’re limited to whatever settings and mods the panel exposes.

If that trade sounds fine, renting is a perfectly good answer and you can stop reading here. If the monthly bill is the part that bugs you, keep going.

Route 2: Run it yourself on Windows, step by step

This is the full manual route. Budget an afternoon the first time. None of it is hard exactly, but there are a lot of small steps, and one of them (port forwarding) depends on things outside your control.

A note before we start: the ASA dedicated server is only published as a Windows program. It can be made to run on Linux with a compatibility layer, but that’s a much fiddlier project, so this walkthrough assumes a Windows PC.

Step 1: Install SteamCMD

SteamCMD is a free command-line version of Steam that downloads game servers. You don’t need to own ASA on the account you use here; the dedicated server is a free download.

Download SteamCMD from Valve’s official site (search “SteamCMD download”, the developer.valvesoftware.com result).
Make a folder at C:\steamcmd and unzip it there.
Double-click steamcmd.exe once. It’ll update itself and show a Steam> prompt. Type quit and press Enter.

Step 2: Download the ASA server

Open Command Prompt (press the Windows key, type cmd, press Enter) and run:

C:\steamcmd\steamcmd.exe +force_install_dir C:\asa-server +login anonymous +app_update 2430930 validate +quit

That long number is the Steam app ID for the ASA dedicated server. The download is big, so go make coffee. When it finishes, your server lives in C:\asa-server.

Step 3: Create a start script and launch it

Open Notepad and paste this in, changing the names and passwords to your own:

start "" "C:\asa-server\ShooterGame\Binaries\Win64\ArkAscendedServer.exe" "TheIsland_WP?listen?SessionName=Our Server?ServerPassword=friendsonly?ServerAdminPassword=pickabetterone" -WinLiveMaxPlayers=10

Save it as start-server.bat somewhere handy (in “Save as type”, pick “All files” so Notepad doesn’t add .txt).
Double-click it. A console window opens and fills with text. The first launch takes several minutes; the server is ready when the text stops scrolling and you see it advertising itself.

TheIsland_WP is the map. ServerPassword is what your friends type to join; leave it out entirely for an open server. ServerAdminPassword is for admin commands, so make it different and keep it private.

Step 4: Let it through the Windows firewall

Windows blocks incoming connections by default. The first time the server runs, Windows usually shows an “allow access” prompt. Check both “Private” and “Public” and click Allow.

If you missed the prompt: open “Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security”, click “Inbound Rules”, then “New Rule”, and allow UDP port 7777. That’s the port ASA players connect on.

While you’re there, allow UDP port 27015 too. That’s the query port, the one ASA uses to advertise your server to the in-game browser. Your friends can join without it by typing your address, but with it your server turns up in the list by name, which is how most people expect to find it.

Step 5: Test it from inside your house

Before involving the internet, make sure the server works on your home network.

On the server PC, open Command Prompt and run ipconfig. Note the “IPv4 Address” (something like 192.168.1.50).
On a different PC on the same wifi, launch ASA, and from the main menu open the console (enable it in settings if you haven’t, then press Tab).
Type open 192.168.1.50:7777 (your address, not ours) and press Enter.

If you load into your world, the server itself is working. Everything from here on is about letting people outside your house in.

Step 6: Port forwarding, so friends can join

Your router ignores unexpected traffic from the internet, which is normally great. Port forwarding is you telling it “traffic on port 7777 is expected, send it to the server PC.”

Every router’s admin page looks different, but the shape is always:

Give the server PC a fixed address on your network (look for “DHCP reservation” or “static lease” in the router settings) so it doesn’t change after a reboot.
Find the port forwarding section (sometimes called “virtual server” or “NAT forwarding”).
Forward UDP port 7777 to the server PC’s address, and UDP port 27015 as well so the server lists itself.
Find your public IP by searching “what is my IP” on the server PC.
Your friends join with open YOUR-PUBLIC-IP:7777 in their console, plus the server password. Once the query port is through, they can also just search the unofficial server list for the SessionName you set back in Step 3, which is easier than passing your IP around.

If that worked: congratulations, you’re done, and you should feel good about it. Set a reminder to re-run the Step 2 command whenever ASA updates (stop the server first), and skip ahead to Step 8.

Step 7: The catch nobody warns you about (CGNAT)

For a lot of people, Step 6 simply doesn’t work, and it’s not their fault.

Many internet providers no longer give each home its own public address. Instead they share one public address across a whole neighborhood, a setup called CGNAT (carrier-grade NAT). Behind CGNAT, port forwarding can’t work, no matter how correctly you configure your router. The traffic never reaches your router in the first place.

How to check: log in to your router and find the WAN or “internet” address it reports. Compare it to what “what is my IP” says. If they’re different, you’re behind CGNAT. An address starting with 100. on the router is also a giveaway.

Your options if you’re stuck:

Call your ISP and ask for a public (sometimes “static”) IP address. Some providers do it free, some charge a few dollars a month, some flatly won’t.
Use a tunnel or relay service. These route your server’s traffic through a machine that does have a public address. Workable, but you’re now maintaining one more moving part.
Use a platform with a relay built in, which is route 3 below. This exact problem is the main reason we built it.

The same applies if you can’t touch the router at all (dorms, apartments with building-wide internet, a parent who guards the admin password).

Step 8: Settings, mods, and keeping it running

The server is up. A few things that make it livable long-term:

Settings live in C:\asa-server\ShooterGame\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\GameUserSettings.ini and Game.ini. This is where you set harvest rates, taming speed, XP multipliers, and everything else. Edit while the server is stopped.
Mods come from CurseForge. Add -mods= followed by the mod IDs (comma-separated) to your start script, and the server downloads them on launch.
Updates: when ASA patches, players can’t join until the server updates too. Stop the server, re-run the Step 2 command, start it again.
Sleep settings: set the PC to never sleep (Settings, then Power) or your server will vanish the first time the machine dozes off. If it’s a laptop, also set the lid-close action to “do nothing”. We’ve watched this one take down a perfectly good server mid-session.
Crashes: ASA servers do crash now and then. Manually, that means noticing and double-clicking the script again. The really dedicated eventually write themselves a watchdog script to do it automatically; most people just live with it.

That’s the honest manual picture: an afternoon of setup, a bit of ongoing care, and a hard dependency on your ISP playing nice.

Route 3: The guided way

This is the part where we tell you what we built, and why.

Server Reforged does route 2 for you, on a spare computer, without the sharp edges. You install Ubuntu Server on the machine (a free operating system; our click-by-click guide assumes you’ve never done it), paste one command from your dashboard, and the machine becomes a managed game server. Creating the ASA server, picking maps, editing settings, and managing CurseForge mods all happen in a clean web dashboard.

The networking difference is the big one: your server connects outward to a relay we run, and your friends connect to that. No port forwarding, no router settings, and CGNAT doesn’t matter. Your friends can join no matter how your home internet is set up. Updates, crash recovery, and the “never sleep” settings are handled for you too.

It’s free while we’re in beta, with no credit card. When paid plans arrive they’ll cost well under what renting does, because you’re bringing the hardware. The getting started guide shows the whole journey, and it takes about half an hour.

Which route should you pick?

Rent if you have no spare hardware, or you’re running a serious 24/7 public community and want someone else on the hook for uptime.
Manual if you’ve got a Windows machine, your ISP gives you a real public IP, and you enjoy this kind of project. It’s genuinely satisfying, and everything you learned here transfers to other games.
Server Reforged if you’ve got the spare hardware and want the result without the afternoon of setup, or if CGNAT has you boxed in. That’s exactly who we built it for.

Quick answers

How much RAM does an ASA server need? 16 GB minimum for a real server with players on it. 32 GB if you want headroom or plan to run mods and multiple maps.

Can I host and play on the same PC? With 32 GB of RAM, yes. With 16 GB, the client and server will fight over memory and both will lose. A separate machine is the comfortable answer.

What does self-hosting actually cost? Electricity. A typical desktop running around the clock works out to a few dollars a month depending on your rates, and it only draws real power while people are playing.

My friends can’t connect. What’s wrong? Work through Steps 5 to 7 above in order: confirm it works on your own network first, then check the port forward, then check for CGNAT. The CGNAT check surprises more people than anything else in this guide.

How many players can a home PC handle? For a friend group of 2 to 20, a 16 GB machine with a modern-ish CPU handles it fine. Hundreds of players is a different sport and needs rented iron.