Servers · Game hosting

Game servers are limited by one core, not by how many you buy.

The industry prices game hosting by core count because core count scales a price list. What decides whether your world stutters is the speed of a single thread and whether you have enough memory — which usually means the right machine costs less than the one you were about to buy.

Configure a server Test it by the hour first

What actually limits it

Three constraints, in the order they bite.

Not CPU, RAM and disk — that ordering is exactly what makes people buy the wrong machine. These are the ones that decide whether players notice.

The tick

Single-thread speed

A game server simulates the world in ticks — a fixed number per second, each one a pass over every entity, block update and player action. That loop is overwhelmingly a single thread. When it cannot finish inside its budget the tick rate drops, and that is what players feel as rubber-banding and delayed hits. A faster core raises the ceiling. A second core does not, because the loop cannot run on two at once.

Buy for: Clock speed and cache, not core count.

The ceiling

Memory

Memory decides how much world and how many players fit before the machine starts swapping — and a server that swaps is a server that has already stopped being playable. Modded and plugin-heavy setups multiply this: the mods are resident whether anyone is playing or not. This is the number worth being generous with, because running out of it is abrupt rather than gradual.

Buy for: Enough that you are not near the edge, then stop.

The felt experience

The network

Once the tick is healthy, everything a player calls lag is the network. Distance sets the floor on round-trip time and no hardware fixes it, which makes the region a more important decision than the plan. A modest machine near your players beats a large one on the other side of an ocean, every time.

Buy for: The region your players are in, before anything else.

The expensive mistake

The machine most people ask us for is bigger than the one they need.

We would rather lose the difference than sell it. Here is the shape of the decision, including the part that argues against our own expensive hardware.

A server for friends

One world, a small group, no heavy modpack. This is bound by a single thread and a few gigabytes. The High frequency line exists for exactly this shape of work: faster physical cores rather than more of them. Anything larger is money spent on cores that the simulation loop cannot use.

A community server that must not stutter

Here the argument for pinned cores is real: a shared core is quick in bursts and unpredictable under constant load, and a game server is constant load. What you are buying is not speed but the absence of a neighbour.

Many worlds, or one very large one

This is where metal earns it — genuinely unshared hardware, and in DS-5’s case extra L3 cache stacked on the cores for working sets that nearly fit in it. It is the most expensive answer on this page and the right one least often.

The other side

When the extra cores do earn their money.

The argument above is not that big machines are pointless. It is that core count answers a different question from the one most people are asking.

Several worlds on one machine: Each server process gets its own core budget. Ten instances is the case where core count is genuinely the variable — not one instance with ten times the players.
Modpacks with heavy world generation: Generation and chunk work can be parallel even when the tick is not, and it is the part that spikes when a player walks somewhere new.
A community that is actually large: Above a certain population the working set stops fitting in cache and memory bandwidth starts to matter. That is the point where a machine like DS-5, with extra L3 stacked on its cores, does something a faster clock alone cannot.

Region beats hardware. Before choosing between any two plans on this page, choose where the machine sits. A modest server near your players will feel better than a large one across an ocean, because distance sets a floor on round-trip time that no amount of hardware removes. Start from the region list.

Questions

What people ask before they buy one.

Do I need a dedicated server for a game server?

Usually not, and we would rather say so than sell you one. A server for a handful of friends is bound by one thread and a few gigabytes of memory — a small instance on the High frequency line does that for a fraction of the price of metal. Buy a whole machine when you are running many instances at once, when a modpack has outgrown what a VPS plan offers in memory, or when you need the hardware to be nobody else's. Those are real reasons. "Games need a dedicated server" is not one.

Why does more RAM not make it run faster?

Because memory is a ceiling, not a throttle. Below the ceiling the server runs at the speed its cores allow; above it, the machine swaps and performance collapses. Adding memory to a server that is not short of it changes nothing at all. What raises the tick rate is a faster core, and what lowers it is more work per tick.

Will more cores raise the tick rate?

Not for a single instance. The simulation loop is one thread, so it runs at the speed of one core no matter how many are present. Extra cores help when there are extra processes to put on them — several worlds, background tasks, world generation — which is a different question from making one world smoother.

Which of your machines has the most cache?

DS-5, an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. The 3D V-Cache stacks additional L3 on one of its core complexes, which is worth a great deal when the working set nearly fits in cache and very little when it does not. It is the specialist of our range and priced like one — buy it for the cache, deliberately, or buy something cheaper.

Do you protect against DDoS attacks?

We do not publish a DDoS specification, and we are not going to imply one we cannot evidence. Mitigation on our regions is whatever the underlying network provides, and that is not something we can put a number or a guarantee against. If attack resilience is a requirement rather than a hope, say so before you order and we will tell you plainly what we can and cannot commit to — rather than selling you a badge.

How do I know which plan is right before I pay for a month?

Rent it for an afternoon. Most of our plans bill by the hour against a balance you fund, the meter stops when you delete the server, and a month left running never costs more than the monthly price. Put your actual world and your actual players on two different plans, watch the tick rate, and keep the one that holds. That is a better answer than any table we could publish.

Is bandwidth going to be a problem?

Rarely for a game server — the traffic is small, frequent packets rather than volume. It becomes a question if you are also streaming or serving modpack downloads from the same machine, and the Unmetered line exists for exactly that. Every other line publishes its transfer allowance on the plan.

Keep reading

The pages this one keeps pointing at.

Other workloads