A home-built game hosting server,Is it worth it?

[Unconventional]

I am considering to build a "server" box to host games,not store data.
I am looking to host at most 5 people including me.
I do not have a list and I am wonderin if it is worth it for my purpose or should my build [ https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Agent_Blackwing/saved/Ktht6h ]still run games while hosting the server?

[Unconventional]

PunCrathod eredeti hozzászólása:

I run my own hosted gameserver. I use an intel G3420 processor with 16gigs of ram and mostly run a 240+mods minecraft server on it. Sometimes I even have an ark server on it when my friends want to play it. The whole build cost us about $250 and when split between the 6 people that play on it the most it wasn't that big of an investment.

Whether you get better performance running the gameserver on a separate servermachine instead of your gaming machine depends on the game but atleast for minecraft and ark it made a huge difference. None of us had a pc that could run the server and client at the same time without massive lag. But when we put it on the servermachine we all could play lag free just fine.

Oh and when picking a processor for the server machine you should look at the singlethread preformance as almost all gameservers are singlethreaded. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html has a nice list
You wouldn't want to pay $400 for a processor that is outperformed by a $100 processor in the task of running a minecraft server

As long as you have the bandwith for it(I have 20Mbps upload but aslong as you have more than 1Mbps per player you should be fine) and the patience to set it all up then it makes a world of a difference. And in the long run fi you play more than 2 different games its also cheaper than renting all those servers from renting services. And often these renting services have multiple clients sharing same hardware and the performance can be even worse than just hosting it on your gaming machine.
And as an added bonus you have a homeserver that can do a bunch of stuff other than the game servers. For example I run a teamspeak server and a bunch of other goodies and they haven't had any impact on running the game servers.

I will look into it but for now just the basics

[Bad 💀 Motha]

MineCraft is just one thing; most Game Servers might need a much stronger CPU; SSD(s) help too. Alot of Pro Servers have switched over to SSDs now. Now you might think; well alot of servers still use HDDs though right? Yes, but those mechanical HDDs that servers do use, are generally high performance, not a typical grade consumer HDD.

Now again though, if you have parts on hand, maybe share that and consider that to get started before making any investments you might regret or realize later you might have easily gotten away with spending less to do the same thing well/smooth enough.

[PunCrathod]

Well then the most important thing is to check if your internet connection can handle the gameservers. The best way to do that would be to host a server and see if all of your friends can play on it without much lag. If they can then the connection checks out. You could then test what if you start a client and join the server. If it starts to lag then then you would most propably benefit from having a separate server machine.