Considering buying my own Private Server, and I could use some advice...

[rexappel]

Considering buying my own Private Server, and I could use some advice...

So, as the title says, I got Ye Olde Potato working again, I'm down in Australia and I'm bloody well sick of the rubber-banding on official servers because people who've been breeding since Beta insist on building massive bases over the top of resources and filling them with hundreds of dinos, lagging the server and spamming pillars all over the map.

Figured that it would be in my best interest to buy a private server, rent it off Nitrado and go from there.

That said, this is my first attempt hiring a server, ever. I have no idea what I'm potentially signing myself up for, and I could use some advice from some veterans of this particular battlefield.

So a few questions before I start bombarding the poor folks at Nitrado with my dumb questions.

 

• I'm assuming 'slots' refers to the amount of players that can be on a server at a time? While I doubt we'll break 20 players in a year, a lot of the gaming crew has S.O.s, children and co-workers who also play and a nice, friendly server with low food drain on the tames could end up being rather popular as a nice place to drop a character and just vegitate. How hard/difficult is it to increase the amount of 'slots' a server can have.
• What, if any, QoL mods should I be aiming for on a PC for my players to have access to? Just for better quality buildings, placeables and possibly different weapon/tool types.
• As the server owner, how hard is it for me to give myself 'Mod Powers' so I can spawn in objects, creatures and the like to help get the Server 'built' with starter 'towns' for the players to explore what the installed mods will look like and/or allow players to have a safe location to spawn into the world without having to worry about random Gigas wandering down to the spawn zones.
• How difficult is it to keep a Private Server 'private'? Obviously aiming for our own Discord and a password to access the server, but how difficult is it to change the password if one of the players is dumb or accidentally leaks the password, and how easy is it for the hackers and/or PvP 'Bruhs' to crash a private Nitrado server?
• How difficult is it to move Tames from Private to Official servers, and vice-versa? Some of the players have quite the roster of tames, and I lost all of mine after the old PC decided to kamikaze itself and I've had to rebuild it from the ground up ... which also somehow wiped my entire roster off the face of the earth. Yes, I am salty that three years of breeding Ovis, Troodons and Drop Bears is down the drain, but I can rebuild!

 

Is there anything I've missed, of anything that more seasoned server-renters can point out to me before I plunge into this maelstrom of finageling?

[Larkfields]

Hi...

1. Slots = number of simultaneous players.
2. Mods : my favourites are Awesome Teleports, Awesome Spyglass, Arkomatic and S+.  Ask 20 people and you'll get 20 different answers ?
3. There is a config file where you enter your steam ID and that gives you "mod powers" by default.
4. I recommend using a whitelist, which is a separate file with the list of people's Steam IDs who are allowed to use your server.  Passwords can be a pain.
5. Impossible.  You can't move anything from an official server to a private server.

Let us know how you get on.
 

[SylenThunder]

Renting from a hosting company will end up costing you a lot in monthly fees. The more servers/map you want to offer, the more it's going to cost. Same for slots. The alternative is to rent a VPS or something similar, but again you are looking at a lot of cash going out every month.

The alternative, if you've got decent internet, is to self-host. Initial costs can seem a little bit daunting, but it pays for itself rather quickly in comparison.

For example, I purchased this rack. I then got a few SSD's, and tray slots for the drives. (2x 120GB Kingston SSD's, 2x 250GB Samsung 860 Evo's, and drive caddies ran us $150 with tax and shipping)

I set up the pair of Kingston SSD's in RAID-0 for the main OS, and the pair of Evo's in RAID-0 for the servers. Running Win10 on it, and hosting a cluster of 8 Ark servers alongside Empyrion. W used to run two Conan Exiles servers and The Forest on it as well, but shut them down due to lack of players. With 24 cores at our disposal, it is really easy to dedicate each server to it's own set.

 

But seriously, if you've just got a spare PC that's got a decent speed CPU, enough RAM, and a decent SSD, you can host a couple of servers on it without an issue. I was running on an i7-3930k with 32GB RAM and an SSD before we got the PowerEdge.

[millwight]

Me and my tribe mate have just rented a private server from Ark servers.IO. it's a 60 slot server we're paying $16 a month for Island map. we're still in beta testing should be ready in a week. It's PVE with Quality of Life mods. Wild Dino level cap is 200  2X Xp 5X harvesting 8X breeding. Tired of GM's destroying whole bases over someone's ticket. if you're interested let me know.

Discord tag:

Overwatch#6045