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?
It usually depends on the circumstances. I have a dedicated server rented from Hetzner which has some unused resources anyways, so I tend to just run our gameservers on that. But if you just want a fast and hassle free solution or don’t have spare resources Nitrado is pretty good.
Depends on your electricity costs, I guess.
You can also turn your computer off when nobody’s going to be playing.
Check your electricity cost and compare that to begin with. I assume that your server will probably consume more than 40 watts on average. You have to factor in idle consumption with the game running. Assuming 40ct/kWh that would amount to 10,57€ per month only in electricity.
I also host Ark and can assert it has surprisingly minimal demands for a small handful of users. Meaning, you can double stack it with other game hosts.
If electricity consumption is the primary concern, you can always script your server to turn on and off on a schedule.
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.
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.
As a multiplayer game developer, bandwidth and latency are usually the forefront in my mind. Tech and electricity aren’t as “limited” as internet usually is and about 75% of all customer service issues are dealing with internet. I can’t tell you how many times people with terrible internet connections have told me to “fix your servers” in the games I worked on, when the servers are just fine and their ISP has started throttling them because they use too much bandwidth/data.
In any case, the games you mentioned aren’t as action heavy as something like Deathmatches or, in my case, car soccer, so you can still have a narsty internet connection and it’ll be fine for you and your 6 friends. The moment you start hosting huge raids or groups is when you’ll start feeling the pinch. You’ll also feel the pinch in games where the server controls the physics. The amount of data that the server will push is insane and it’s replicated across all the clients to make sure the physics data is exact to each client. This is where exponential clients will actually kill an internet connection, speaking from experience.
As a general rule, self hosting is not cheaper, in the same way that it’s not cheaper to sew your own clothes, make your own furniture, raise your own chickens, etc, because by the time you invest all the time and effort into tools and labour, you’re well over the cost of the actual thing.
What it is a satisfying hobby and in the longer longer term might save you a little bit.
No idea. Depends how much it costs you to host your own server?
Does hosting it yourself cost more or less than €12 per 30 days?
It is generally cheaper to pay for hosting if that’s all you’re doing.
You don’t need a GPU to host a server, just a decent cpu and a decent amount of RAM.
I’m not sure how well it works hosting on the same pc as you’re gaming on. I’d expect it would lower performance for both to some degree.
You can use a power calculator to get a rough estimate of the costs.
For example, a pc running 24 hours a day at 0.30/kwh using 150w would cost just under 30 per month.