How to Host a Game Server on a Dedicated Server

You started with one rented Minecraft or ARK slot. Now you're running three or four servers across two or three games, juggling separate control panels, separate bills, and separate resource limits on each one. At that point, a dedicated server stops being an upgrade & starts being the obvious move.

This guide walks through the decision & the setup: when a dedicated box pays off, how to pick the hardware, which OS to run, whether to use a panel or go manual, the networking basics you need before players connect, and what to do in the first hour after your server gets delivered.

When a dedicated server beats renting individual game slots

Rented game server slots are priced per-game and per-slot count, which means the cost scales linearly with every community you run. Add a Rust server, add a bill. Add an ARK map, add another bill. Each one also comes with a hard resource ceiling set by the plan, not by you.

A dedicated server flips that math. You pay one flat price for the whole box, and every game server you deploy on it shares the same pool of CPU cores, RAM, and NVMe storage. Two or three rented slots is often cheaper than a dedicated server. Four or five active game servers, especially if any of them are RAM-hungry (a modded Minecraft pack, an ARK map with a full server list, several Rust servers running plugins) is usually where the crossover happens, because you stop paying a per-slot markup on top of raw hardware cost.

Host Havoc's own pricing shows where that line sits. Minecraft plans run $5 per GB of RAM, and the entry-level dedicated server is $200 a month with 128 GB on board, which works out to about $1.56 per GB. Once your servers add up to roughly 40 GB of rented RAM, you're paying the same as you would for the whole machine. A 16 GB modded server, a 12 GB minigames server, and two 8 GB survival worlds already put you at 44 GB.

The other factor is control. On a rented slot, the RAM and player caps come with the plan you bought. On a dedicated server, the hardware is yours alone, and you decide how to split it. Host Havoc's dedicated plans, for example, come with no contracts and the company owns the hardware outright, so there's no reseller layer between you and the physical box.

How to pick hardware for game servers

Most game server processes are single-threaded or lightly threaded on their main game loop, which means clock speed and per-core performance matter more than total core count. Minecraft is the clearest example: the server's main tick loop, the part that handles mob AI, block updates, redstone, and player actions, runs on a single thread. The server aims for 20 ticks a second, so that one thread has 50 milliseconds to get through each tick. A CPU with fewer, faster cores will out-tick a CPU with more, slower cores, because only one core carries the critical path.

That single-thread bias shows up across most of the genre. Survival and sandbox titles like ARK and Valheim, and many Source/GoldSrc-derived shooters, lean on one primary thread for game state even when the engine spreads networking, physics, or chunk generation across a few others. When you're picking between server configurations, prioritize a CPU with strong single-core clock speed & recent architecture over one that just has more cores.

RAM budgeting depends entirely on what you're running, and it adds up fast once you stack multiple servers on one box. These figures come from the developers and wikis for each game:

Vanilla Minecraft: 4 GB covers 20 to 35 players on Host Havoc's own plan table.
Modded Minecraft: Host Havoc recommends at least 4 GB for any modpack & 8 GB or more for kitchen-sink packs.
ARK: Survival Ascended: the ARK wiki puts The Island at 8 to 10 GiB and The Center at 10.5 to 12 GiB, and every map in a cluster is its own server.
Rust: Facepunch's wiki calls for 12 GB of free RAM, and more on a 6k map.
Palworld: Pocketpair's docs list 16 GB and recommend more than 32 GB for stable operation.

Storage matters more than people expect. Game worlds are read and written constantly: Minecraft writes region files on every chunk save, ARK autosaves the whole map on a timer, and Rust's procedural maps and save files get large on populated servers. NVMe drives handle that random small-file I/O far better than spinning disks or even SATA SSDs, which is why every current Host Havoc dedicated tier ships with NVMe storage rather than older SATA drives.

For a sense of where price-to-spec lands, Host Havoc's dedicated game servers run from $200/month for an Intel Xeon E-2388G with 128 GB of DDR4 up to $385/month for an AMD Ryzen 9950X with 192 GB of DDR5, all on NVMe storage with 100 TB of bandwidth. Host Havoc lists a single-core benchmark score next to each CPU for exactly the reason above. The Ryzen 7900X at $280/month scores about 25% higher than the Xeon on a single core, and the three Ryzen tiers land within 4% of each other, so stepping up from the 7900X to the 9950X mostly buys you more cores & more RAM rather than faster ticks.

RAM and storage on any of these tiers can be upgraded after the fact, so you don't have to guess your ceiling on day one. If you're running two or three moderate game servers, the Xeon tier covers you. If you're stacking a modded Minecraft pack, an ARK cluster, and a couple of Rust servers on the same box, you want the higher-clocked Ryzen tiers with more RAM headroom.

Choosing an operating system

You've got two real paths here: Linux or Windows Server. Most dedicated game hosting runs on Linux because most game server binaries (Minecraft, Rust, Valheim, Palworld, CS2 & most Source-engine titles) ship a native Linux build, and the OS itself carries no license fee. Host Havoc's Linux options cover AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS.

Windows Server is available too, and it's the right call for titles that ship no Linux server binary at all. ARK: Survival Ascended is the common example; the ARK wiki states that it requires Windows and doesn't support Linux natively. The license is billed monthly on top of your server price. Check each title's own server documentation before you commit to an OS, because a community-maintained Wine or Proton wrapper is not the same thing as a binary the developer built and tested. If even one game on your list is Windows-only, that one title decides the OS for the whole box.

Panel vs manual server setup

You don't have to manage everything from a raw shell prompt. Host Havoc includes a free game management panel with every dedicated server, at no extra charge, for deploying and controlling game servers on the box, and it works whether you want a fully managed setup or prefer to handle things yourself.

Two other panels come up constantly in gaming communities, and it's worth knowing where they fit:

Pterodactyl is free, open-source, and runs each game server in an isolated Docker container behind a web UI. It's a strong pick if you're comfortable with some initial configuration and want granular control over resource limits per server instance. Its Wings daemon only runs on Linux, so it isn't an option on a Windows box.
AMP (Application Management Panel), built by CubeCoders, is a commercially licensed panel with a polished interface and broad game support out of the box, on both Windows and Linux. Licensing is tiered by edition, so check the current terms against how many instances you plan to run.

A panel isn't mandatory. If you're comfortable with SSH, systemd services, and SteamCMD, you can run everything manually and skip the extra layer entirely. Most communities running more than two or three servers end up using a panel anyway, because clicking start beats SSHing in and remembering the right flags.

Networking basics before players connect

Your dedicated server ships with its own dedicated IP address, which matters because it means your game servers aren't sharing a NAT'd address with anyone else's traffic, and DNS records or Steam server browser listings point cleanly at you.

Each game needs specific ports opened, and the defaults vary by title:

Minecraft (Java Edition): 25565 TCP.
Rust: 28015 UDP for the game port, plus an RCON port on TCP and a query port on UDP. With RCON on 28016, as in Facepunch's example, the query port defaults to 28017, one above whichever of the other two is higher.
Palworld: 8211 UDP.
Valheim: 2456 and 2457 UDP. The server uses the port you set plus the next one up.
ARK: Survival Ascended: 7777 UDP for the game, 27015 UDP for the query port, and 27020 TCP for RCON.
Most Source-engine and GoldSrc titles (CS2, Team Fortress 2, and similar): 27015.

Look at those last two. ARK's query port and every Source-engine server both default to 27015, so they'll collide the moment you put them on the same IP, and one of them has to move. The same goes for a second copy of any game: bump Minecraft to 25566, start a second Valheim world at 2458 because the first one took two ports, and so on. A panel like Pterodactyl or Host Havoc's included panel handles this for you automatically when you deploy a new instance.

DDoS protection is the other piece worth planning for before launch, not after your server goes down mid-event. Host Havoc includes DDoS protection on its dedicated servers as part of the base price, backed by a 100% power and network uptime SLA, so an attack against one of your game servers doesn't take down your connection entirely.

First steps after your server is delivered

Once the box is provisioned, a short checklist gets you from empty hardware to a running community:

Log into the panel (or SSH in) and confirm your OS, IP address, and open ports match what you ordered.
Deploy your first game server instance through the panel, or pull the dedicated server files manually via SteamCMD if you're going manual.
Set RAM and CPU allocation for that instance, leaving headroom if you plan to add more servers on the same box.
Configure the game-specific config file (server.properties for Minecraft, server.cfg for Rust, GameUserSettings.ini for ARK) with your server name, password, and any mod or plugin list.
Open and forward the correct ports for that game, then test the connection from outside your own network.
Set up automated backups or scheduled saves before you invite players, not after something goes wrong.
Add your second and third game servers the same way, watching total RAM and CPU allocation across all instances so nothing gets starved.

For the game-specific details (app IDs, launch flags, config keys), follow the walkthrough for your title: Palworld dedicated server setup, Conan Exiles dedicated server setup, setting up a Rust server, or setting up a DayZ server.

Private networking, BGP, and larger hardware at Serverside.com

Some communities keep growing past what one box can do. A Minecraft network puts a Velocity proxy in front of a handful of backend servers and a shared MySQL database, and suddenly those machines need to talk to each other privately instead of over the public internet. A Rust community starts running servers in three regions. Someone on the team starts talking about announcing your own IP space. By then you're building infrastructure, and the shopping list changes:

Private networks between machines, so proxies, game nodes, and the database stay off the public internet.
BGP sessions and bring-your-own-IP, so your addresses move with you instead of belonging to a host.
Bigger hardware (EPYC-class and dual-socket servers) for databases, build pipelines, and web backends that scale across threads in a way a game tick loop doesn't.
Hourly billing and API-driven provisioning, so event capacity can come up for a weekend & go away afterward.

That's where Host Havoc's sister company, Serverside.com, fits. It runs bare metal dedicated servers in seven metros across North America and Europe on its own network (AS55285), with user-defined private networks, BGP sessions for customer IP space, dual uplinks on separate switches, custom ISO and iPXE installs, and hourly or monthly billing. The range runs from a $90/month Xeon E3-1270 up to a 32-core EPYC 9354P with 512 GB of DDR5 and two 40 Gbps ports at $1,320/month. If all you're running is game servers, a Host Havoc box with the game panel included is the simpler choice. If the game servers have become one part of a larger stack, start there instead.

Getting started

A dedicated server pays for itself once you're running enough game servers that the per-slot markup on rented hosting starts costing more than renting the whole machine. Pick a CPU tier with strong single-core performance, budget RAM per game rather than per box, and lean on a panel if you'd rather manage your community than manage systemd units.

Host Havoc's dedicated servers for game hosting start at $200/month for the Xeon E-2388G tier and scale up to the Ryzen 9950X at $385/month, with a free management panel, DDoS protection, and no contracts included on every tier.