New to dedicated hosting, my experience so far

[Automatic12pro]

Hopefully this can help others wanting to do the same and offer insight into how to host your own servers.
To start, why bother? Well if you’re like me, you want every map available as WC eventually releases them. But looking at a subscription of $30/month per map is not a good plan. Our cluster shares some of the cost but when a new map comes out, I don’t want to decide what maps getting replaced.
I recently started looking into alternatives to nitrado for my current cluster and settled on moving it to a VPS. But wasn’t finding much info about what system specs to price it out.
So I decided to try and replicate our current cluster on my pc. My machine is a beast and I knew it could handle it but wasn’t sure what to expect.
I setup the server like this
Installed the steam server on c:\
Installed the ark server on “c:\server” directory and copied the folder till there were 3, 1 for each server/map.
Setup a cluster folder for transferring
Setup run scripts with arguments
Configured ports and firewall
And last transferred saves from nitrado to their respective folders on my pc

After some setbacks I was able to launch all 3 servers and find them in ark. Next I was able to get some of the cluster players to test the servers by joining, transferring, building etc. I found that upon starting the server, island uses 10gb of ram but after 10-20 minutes it goes into stasis if not used at 2-3gb. If a few people join it goes to about 4-5gb. I was only able to get about 7 people to connect last minute but will test with many more in the future. The cluster was 3 maps, 2 island and 1 svartalfheim.

What I’ve learned so far is a vps with 12 cores and 64gb of RAM can host 5-7 maps maybe more. Transferring takes 2-3 seconds on a single server, it’s noticeably faster. Nitrado is a huge waste of resources. Way better to host several maps and let them pool resources. Svartalfheim uses 30% of the resources island does. Slots to join can be whatever you want. You can rent a vps for way less than the nitrado equivalent. Lag was obviously great for me but others said that they saw improvement as well.

I’ll post more as I progress but so far happy with the results. Let me know if you have questions about setup or have any suggestions

[Warhamster]

What VPS Provider did you choose?
I've quickly checked Linode and to start, they don't officially support Windows VPS.
And isn't it true that ASA (in contrast to ASE) doesn't support Linux natively?
So you can't run it properly on a Linux VPS?

And even if, at least for Linode it gets crazy expensive, a 64GB RAM VPS costs 384$/mo, which is way more than going with Nitrado.
I want to go down the same path as you, but it seems I'm missing something....

[Smurff-a-thon2k]

Originally posted by Gangsta Yoda:

What VPS Provider did you choose?
I've quickly checked Linode and to start, they don't officially support Windows VPS.
And isn't it true that ASA (in contrast to ASE) doesn't support Linux natively?
So you can't run it properly on a Linux VPS?

And even if, at least for Linode it gets crazy expensive, a 64GB RAM VPS costs 384$/mo, which is way more than going with Nitrado.
I want to go down the same path as you, but it seems I'm missing something....

I think he's saying he's hosting all of this on his own single desktop

[Automatic12pro]

Originally posted by Gangsta Yoda:

What VPS Provider did you choose?
I've quickly checked Linode and to start, they don't officially support Windows VPS.
And isn't it true that ASA (in contrast to ASE) doesn't support Linux natively?
So you can't run it properly on a Linux VPS?

And even if, at least for Linode it gets crazy expensive, a 64GB RAM VPS costs 384$/mo, which is way more than going with Nitrado.
I want to go down the same path as you, but it seems I'm missing something....

Haven’t chose the VPS yet but saw nooblets promoting this.
https://pingperfect.com/index.php/store/windows-normal-vps
Seems reasonable on price.
To my knowledge a windows VPS running server 2019 or 22 should work. Haven’t seen anything on the contrary. I think there’s workarounds for Linux but TBH I’m not familiar enough with the os and supporting it is just another headache so I wasn’t considering it

[Automatic12pro]

Originally posted by Smurff-a-thon2k:

Originally posted by Gangsta Yoda:

What VPS Provider did you choose?
I've quickly checked Linode and to start, they don't officially support Windows VPS.
And isn't it true that ASA (in contrast to ASE) doesn't support Linux natively?
So you can't run it properly on a Linux VPS?

And even if, at least for Linode it gets crazy expensive, a 64GB RAM VPS costs 384$/mo, which is way more than going with Nitrado.
I want to go down the same path as you, but it seems I'm missing something....

I think he's saying he's hosting all of this on his own single desktop

Yes initially. I wanted to see it working before renting a VPS and setting up there

[Automatic12pro]

Update: we proceeded with ping perfect for hosting using their 8core 60gb hosting option. Testing went well with 4 maps after configuration and linking to game server app via rcon connect. Currently live and hosting and Awaiting any reports from players of errors but so far so good

[Choochit]

If you have the internets why don't you just buy the parts to make your own server rig and run all the maps and mods from it?

[Automatic12pro]

Originally posted by RtxSchlag:

If you have the internets why don't you just buy the parts to make your own server rig and run all the maps and mods from it? :cozybethesda:

Ultimately yes, I'm looking for something now but it may take a while to find something used that will meet the specs for hosting. I'm leaning toward a rack server with 24-32 cores and 192-256 GB of DDR4 so that hosting all core maps wont become an issue. Not sure what clock speed to consider though. The VPS shows 2.59Ghz so maybe that?