Don’t know if this Reddit is the best place to ask this but here we go.
I’m the guy in my friends group that always hosts servers for us whenever we want to play some games where dedicated servers are just better.
Sometime in December we wanted to play Ark and I’ve done many servers for Ark in the past but I’m kinda wondering if it’s cheaper to tun a dedicated computer 24/7 just for the server or if it’s better to pick a hosting service?
Nitrado would cost 12€ for 30 days. Is self hosting cheaper?
This is a bit of a generalisation. I’m currently staying somewhere with awful Internet (6mpbs upstream) and I’ve still been able to host dedicated servers for Valheim, Conan, Minecraft and even Astroneer, which is pretty basic in server options. Now these aren’t huge player counts - maybe 6 or less, but that’s probably pretty typical for a small gaming group.
Of course more bandwidth is great, and no doubt some games are much more bandwidth intensive on the server side, but I wouldn’t discount the option to self host just because you’re not rocking a lot of bandwidth.
I will add that I have configured my network to aggressively manage buffer bloat, so latency is very good - that no doubt helps a lot, but is of course something that a lot of people can do, depending on the features in their router.
As a multiplayer game developer, bandwidth and latency are usually the forefront in my mind. Tech and electricity aren’t as “limited” as internet usually is and about 75% of all customer service issues are dealing with internet. I can’t tell you how many times people with terrible internet connections have told me to “fix your servers” in the games I worked on, when the servers are just fine and their ISP has started throttling them because they use too much bandwidth/data.
In any case, the games you mentioned aren’t as action heavy as something like Deathmatches or, in my case, car soccer, so you can still have a narsty internet connection and it’ll be fine for you and your 6 friends. The moment you start hosting huge raids or groups is when you’ll start feeling the pinch. You’ll also feel the pinch in games where the server controls the physics. The amount of data that the server will push is insane and it’s replicated across all the clients to make sure the physics data is exact to each client. This is where exponential clients will actually kill an internet connection, speaking from experience.