Game servers
Run Minecraft, Rust, CS2, ARK, Palworld or FiveM on a dedicated game server with nobody else on the CPU, NVMe for world saves and DDoS filtering in 8 locations.
Minecraft, Rust and ARK simulate the world on one busy main thread, so boost clocks of 5.1–5.7 GHz keep ticks on time as players join.
Up to 128 GB of DDR5 holds several worlds at once, while mirrored NVMe absorbs autosaves and chunk loads that stutter on slow disks.
Always-on L3/L4 mitigation scrubs UDP, SYN and amplification floods before they reach your port, at no extra cost.
Eight locations across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific; compare estimated latency from your players’ cities before choosing.
Recommended servers
From a first deployment to a busy production setup. Live stock and prices; in-stock picks are online in minutes.
Small community
6C / 12T · 3.8–5.1 GHz
Six Zen 4 cores up to 5.1 GHz and 64 GB DDR5: a Minecraft network with a proxy and two or three backends, or one busy Rust server. All 8 locations.
Our pickSeveral games side by side
8C / 16T · 3.8–5.5 GHz
Eight Zen 5 cores up to 5.5 GHz: Minecraft, Rust and a few CS2 instances under one panel, with a fast core for each busy main thread.
Modpacks, clusters, hosting
16C / 32T · 4.3–5.7 GHz
16 cores up to 5.7 GHz, 128 GB DDR5 and 2 × 2 TB NVMe for heavy modpacks, ARK clusters or a small hosting business running dozens of containers.
Sizing
These are rules of thumb from common setups, not measurements: plugins, mods and view distance move the numbers more than the hardware does.
| Game server | Typical need | Suggested plan |
|---|---|---|
| Minecraft (Paper), 20–50 players | One fast core for the main thread, 6–10 GB heap | AMD Ryzen 5 7600 |
| Rust, 100–200 players | One fast core, 12–16 GB RAM that grows until wipe | AMD Ryzen 7 9700X |
| CS2 community servers, 3–6 instances | A core each at high clock, a few GB of RAM each | AMD Ryzen 7 9700X |
| FiveM roleplay with MariaDB | Fast cores for scripts, 16 GB+, database on NVMe | AMD Ryzen 7 9700X |
| ARK or Palworld, 2–3 maps or worlds | 12–16 GB per map or world, more with mods | AMD Ryzen 9 9950X |
| Game hosting business, 20+ instances | Pooled cores and RAM with per-container limits | AMD Ryzen 9 9950X |
Expert notes
Short, practical advice from our engineers for this workload.
A Minecraft, Rust or ARK server advances the world in fixed ticks (Minecraft targets 20 per second, a 50 ms budget each), and most of that work runs on one main thread. When a tick overruns its budget, players feel rubber-banding no matter how many cores sit idle. Extra cores still matter, just differently: they run more instances, garbage collection and world generation.
spark profiler shows which plugin, entity or chunk eats the tick on Paper.--cpuset-cpus or Pterodactyl’s CPU pinning, so two main threads never share one.Every server sits behind always-on L3/L4 mitigation that filters UDP, SYN and amplification floods upstream. Your part is the host firewall: allow only the ports your games need and keep admin interfaces private. Common defaults:
25565/tcp, Bedrock 19132/udp28015/udp for players, 28016/tcp for RCON27015, UDP for gameplay and TCP for RCON8211/udp, FiveM 30120 over TCP and UDPRestrict RCON and panel ports to your own IP or a WireGuard tunnel. Attacks that imitate real players, such as bot joins or login spam, are application-level: stop them with server-side plugins, connection throttles and whitelists.
Most owners run the panel and the daemon on the same server: Pterodactyl’s Panel is a PHP web app, and Wings starts each game in its own Docker container with hard limits on CPU, memory and disk. A few habits keep the box healthy:
Root access means you install exactly what you need. These are proven choices for this workload.
FAQ
Choose the location closest to most of your players, not to you. As a rough guide, US East fits New York or Miami, US West fits Los Angeles, Europe fits Frankfurt, Amsterdam or London, and Asia fits Singapore or Tokyo. The Ryzen 5 7600 and Ryzen 7 9700X are offered in all eight. Our latency checker gives estimated round-trip times from major cities, computed from distance rather than measured.
For a Paper server, 6–10 GB of heap covers most communities of 20–50 players, while heavy modpacks often want 10–16 GB. Set -Xms and -Xmx to the same value and start from Aikar’s flags. Allocating far more heap than the world uses brings no gain and takes memory from your other instances. Plugins, view distance and entity counts usually matter more than raw memory.
Yes. The always-on, network-level mitigation covers L3/L4 attacks such as UDP, SYN and ACK floods, plus amplification through DNS, NTP, SSDP, memcached or CLDAP. Detection is automatic and filtering happens upstream of your server. Traffic that looks like legitimate players, such as bot joins or login spam, reaches the game itself, so handle it with plugins, connection throttles or a whitelist.
Yes, and that is where bare metal pays off. A panel such as Pterodactyl or Pelican runs each game in its own container with CPU, memory and disk limits, so a Rust wipe cannot starve your Minecraft network. Plan roughly one fast core per busy instance, give each its own port, and add IPv4 addresses when two games need the same default port.
Yes. Windows Server 2025 and 2022 install in one click, usually in about 20 minutes, with the license billed monthly per physical core and an 8-core minimum. Some titles ship their dedicated server for Windows only. A few of those also run on Linux under Wine or Proton, but check with the game’s community before relying on it.
Pick one of the recommended in-stock servers and it can be online in minutes. Need something bigger or different? Our engineers quote custom builds within one business day.