Should you rent a game server or host it yourself?

If you already own a computer that can stay on, hosting the server yourself is cheaper, and it isn’t close. Renting a small one runs somewhere around $10 to $20 a month for as long as you keep it. The same server on hardware you already have costs a few dollars of electricity.

That’s the money, and it’s the easy half of this. The harder half is whether you want to be the person who keeps it running. There’s also one thing about your home internet that can settle the whole question before you’ve spent a dollar. Most people don’t find out about it until they’re three hours into a router settings page.

So rather than walk you through the options one at a time, here are the four things that actually decide it. Work through them and the answer picks itself.

Check 1: can a computer be on when your friends want to play

Your server only exists while the machine running it is awake. If everyone plays on Saturday night and the computer is off, there’s no server.

For most friend groups this is easy. A spare desktop in a closet, an old laptop, a machine you were going to sell for $60. It doesn’t need to be the computer you game on, and it’s better if it isn’t.

Two things catch people out. A laptop with the lid closed usually goes to sleep, which takes the server down mid-session, so that setting has to change first. And if your household switches the power strip off at night, your server goes off with it.

If nobody in the group has a machine that can sit powered on, renting stops being the expensive option and starts being the only one. That’s a real answer, and it’s fine.

Check 2: whether your internet provider will let anyone reach you

This is the one that surprises people, and it has nothing to do with how fast your internet is or how good your computer is.

Some providers give your home its own address on the internet. Others share a single address across a lot of homes at once, which saves them money and works fine for everything except being reached from outside. If you’re on a shared one, your friends can’t connect to your server directly, and no setting on your router will change that. People lose whole weekends to this before they find out.

Here’s how to check, in about a minute:

1. Search “what is my IP” in a browser on your home network. Note the number it gives you.
2. Log in to your router’s admin page and find the address it shows for its own internet or WAN connection.
3. Compare the two.

Different numbers means you’re on a shared address. A router address starting with 100. is another giveaway.

If they match, you have your own address, and the normal setup works once you’ve opened the right port. If they don’t, you have three ways forward. You can ask your provider for your own address, which some will sell you and some will refuse. You can rent instead. Or you can use something that sidesteps it by having your server call out rather than wait to be called.

That last one is worth understanding, because it’s the option most people have never heard of. Instead of your friends connecting in to your house, your server makes the connection outward and their traffic comes back down that same line. Providers don’t block connections heading out, so a shared address stops mattering. Some tools do only that one job and leave the rest of running a server to you. Others, including what we build, handle the server too.

If you’ve already hit this wall, our guide to why your friends can’t join works through the full diagnosis in order.

Check 3: whether your upload speed is good enough

Home internet is usually lopsided. Downloads are fast, uploads are much slower, and it’s your upload that carries your friends’ games.

The good news is that game servers need less than people expect. A handful of players on Minecraft, Palworld or ARK needs a few megabits up, and most modern connections clear that without trouble. On fibre you’ll never think about it again.

Where it gets tight is older cable or DSL with an upload under about 5 Mbps, especially if someone else in the house streams or runs a cloud backup at the same time. You’ll notice it as everyone rubber-banding at once rather than as one person having a bad connection.

One thing that isn’t optional: plug the server into your router with a cable. WiFi introduces small stutters that never quite go away, and you’ll spend a week blaming the game.

Check 4: who fixes it at 9pm on a Friday

This is the real cost of self-hosting, and it isn’t measured in dollars.

When you rent, the company handles updates, restarts and the machine itself. When a game patches and the server won’t start, that’s their problem. Part of what you’re paying for is someone else being on call.

When you host it yourself the traditional way, all of that is yours. Game updates that break the server, a crash nobody notices until people try to join, backups you have to remember to make, config files edited by hand. None of it is hard on its own. It’s just constant, and it tends to happen when you’d rather be playing.

There’s a middle option that gets missed, because most advice sorts everyone into “rent one” or “learn Linux”. You can run the server on your own hardware and still have the updates, restarts, backups and settings handled for you from a dashboard. That gap is why we built Server Reforged, and it’s the honest reason this page exists.

What it costs, both ways

Renting. Roughly $10 to $20 a month for a small server, and $20 to $40 once you want more players or heavy mods. Call it $120 to $480 a year, and the bill keeps arriving after everyone has moved on to a different game, unless you remember to cancel.

Hosting on a computer you already own. Electricity. A typical desktop left on around the clock lands at a few dollars a month depending on your rates, and it only draws real power while people are playing. Everything else you already paid for.

Buying a machine for it. A used small-form-factor office PC runs about $150 to $400. Against a $15 a month rental that pays for itself inside two years, which is a long wait if saving money is your only reason. If the machine earns its keep some other way, the arithmetic looks better.

The thing those numbers hide is that renting usually gets you less hardware than the computer already sitting in your closet. Memory is what game servers run out of first, and the machine you stopped using in 2021 probably has more of it than a $15 plan does.

So which one?

If you have a spare machine, a decent upload and your own address from your provider, host it yourself. You’ll save real money, and your worlds stay on a machine you own, so you can back them up or carry them somewhere else whenever you want. Our step-by-step walkthroughs cover ARK: Survival Ascended and Palworld.

If you have none of those, rent one. It’s the right call and there’s nothing wrong with it.

If you have the hardware but the rest of it sounds like a project you don’t want, that’s the gap we sit in. Server Reforged turns a spare computer into a managed server, works whether or not your provider gave you your own address, and handles the updates and backups so you’re not the help desk. It’s free while we’re in beta, and setup takes about half an hour.

Quick answers

Is self-hosting actually cheaper? Yes, if you already own the computer. You trade a $10 to $20 monthly bill for a few dollars of electricity. If you have to buy hardware first, it takes a year or two to come out ahead.

Why can my friends join some games but not my server? Games that connect players straight to each other work differently from a server sitting and waiting for people to reach it. A provider sharing one address across many homes blocks the second and not the first.

Can I host on WiFi? You can, but don’t. A wired connection is the difference between a server that feels smooth and one where everyone stutters at the same moment.

Does hosting at home show my IP address to the people who join? With a normal setup, yes. Anyone joining sees the address your home connects from. For a private server among friends that’s usually fine. If it bothers you, an outward-connecting setup hides it, because players connect to that service instead of to your house.

What happens when the game updates? On a rented server the host takes care of it. Doing it by hand, you stop the server, run the update again and start it back up, and until you do, players on the new version can’t get in. A managed setup on your own hardware does this for you.

How many players can a home computer handle? For a group of 2 to 20 friends, a machine with 16 GB of memory and a reasonably modern processor is comfortable. Hundreds of players is a different problem, and that one wants rented hardware.