I need some REAL advice on buying a CLUSTER SERVER

[Seljdon]

I see everywhere that people keep saying that Studio Wildcard (Technically Snail Games) has a special deal with Nitrado with selling unofficial servers to people for Ark: Survival Ascended. That no one else has the "right" too.

However here is my problem with this, Nitrado does not have cluster server costs set up at all. You can cluster but each map must be paid for on a separate server subscription if you want them all going at once. For an entire year that is $249.69 FOR ONE MAP! Yes I do know that people say you can freely switch the map as many times as you want. However that isn't what I am looking for. I am looking for like what the original game did.

For those of you who don't know a cluster server for this game means all the maps are activate whether someone is on them or not. And can freely create a character or transfer to and back again said previous maps and they're all "active". Back in 2018 the last time I played Ark: Survival Evolved heavily it was easy to find four or five different server clusters active. A family member of mine's son in law used to get cluster servers at $75 - $150 a year for four to five maps at a time all active. There is no way that servers are at a 600% increase in cost. There is no reason these people need to make that kind of money just to have four maps active at one time.

Now before you say that the the game is new and it takes time to drop prices, I say B.S. to that. The game is NEARLY a year old. Ark: Survival Evolved had servers up and purchasable in six months for the island. $15 a month or $50 a year (when maps came out they would allow for a five to seven dollar increase to that yearly total to add it to a cluster). So no it's not new, this is price gouging. And sure I understand the seller gets to set the price. However that's not going to get people to pay for it being so damn unreasonable.

[Vig]

Ok so what you need is an oldish PC that is laying around or buy one to make as a dedicated server, It does not need to be great but the better it is the more smother things will be. To give you an idea, i started out with my old gaming rig, an i5-5600 with 32gb mem and a gen3 NVME 1TB. That enabled me to run 3 maps. work on this, currently each map is consuming anything from 9GB-12GB of memory on my server. You need 8GB for the OS whether it is win10, win11 or server 2019 or ANY other server. I would suggest going server 2019 as its free for you to try for 160 days or something, you coyuld license it later for less than £15. Server takes a a bit to configure, win10/11 does not, but server has less overheads. If you need help setting a server up i would gladly help you.

[Vig]

I currently cluster 6 maps with a ryzen 7 and 128gb mem, a 1TB boot drive and a 2TB storage drive and a decent motherboard, all configured on Server2019. server cpu is ticking over @15% and memory is 48% with 11 players across all maps. I could possibly go to 9-10 maps at my current usage

[Seljdon]

Originally posted by Vig:

Ok so what you need is an oldish PC that is laying around or buy one to make as a dedicated server, It does not need to be great but the better it is the more smother things will be. To give you an idea, i started out with my old gaming rig, an i5-5600 with 32gb mem and a gen3 NVME 1TB. That enabled me to run 3 maps. work on this, currently each map is consuming anything from 9GB-12GB of memory on my server. You need 8GB for the OS whether it is win10, win11 or server 2019 or ANY other server. I would suggest going server 2019 as its free for you to try for 160 days or something, you coyuld license it later for less than £15. Server takes a a bit to configure, win10/11 does not, but server has less overheads. If you need help setting a server up i would gladly help you.

Why the hell are they charging so damn much....

[𝓝𝓪𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓫𝓸𝓲]

there's literally nothing you can do about Nitrado having exclusive rights to ASA servers. I've seen advertisements for other hosts; which i assume would give you a VM to install the ASA servers on; or just be fake AF. I assume Nitrado price is because ASA servers run hefty AND they know it's the "hot new" and charge more because they can... people will rent servers no matter what.

You're only other option is to host the cluster on your own hardware. ASM for ASA doesn't exist in a commercially usable state; it's in early alpha. There are tools online to manage a server though; you just need a spare PC/server.

I personally repurposed my old gaming PC to host my cluster and it works phenomenally. I also wrote a script to update all my servers in succession which is significantly faster/better than ASM since ASA's server software is much easy to work with.

TLDR: nothing you can do about Nitrado.

[Ratigan]

Either buy a used serverrack or rent a VPS, there is no other way

[KornKron]

Nitrado loaned Snail games money so that they could finish Ark SA, the loan dictated that Nitrado was the only company that would be able to host Ark games. So Snail Games ability to lose all the money gained from Ark SE, has ♥♥♥♥♥♥ everyone.

[Vig]

Originally posted by KornKron:

Nitrado loaned Snail games money so that they could finish Ark SA, the loan dictated that Nitrado was the only company that would be able to host Ark games. So Snail Games ability to lose all the money gained from Ark SE, has ♥♥♥♥♥♥ everyone.

BUT you can host it yourself on your own hardware (Nitrado tried to stop that but failed after massive protests)

[Lisa]

I'm renting a Windows machine and i can run 3 maps on it for 55$ / month.
(It runs my Isle server and all my Discord Bots as well)