Home Game Server

[spm199316]

I am trying to find a server that I can host a few Ark: Survival Evolved instances on. In the future I would also like to host a few more VM’s on it. I have looked into some options from game hosting companies but most of which seem to be ridiculously priced. I have seen other posts here where people recommended getting a used dual Xeon server from eBay. I have looked a quite a few, but I really don’t know what I’m looking for and if they are even a good price. 

 

What server/processor would you all recommend?

 

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. 

Thanks in advance,

Sam McAnany

[The Old Myron Siren]

45 minutes ago, spm199316 said:

I am trying to find a server that I can host a few Ark: Survival Evolved instances on. In the future I would also like to host a few more VM’s on it. I have looked into some options from game hosting companies but most of which seem to be ridiculously priced. I have seen other posts here where people recommended getting a used dual Xeon server from eBay. I have looked a quite a few, but I really don’t know what I’m looking for and if they are even a good price. 

 

My budget is $400, but I would like to spend as little as possible. What server would you all recommend?

 

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. 

Thanks in advance,

Sam McAnany

I have a dual Xeon server in my home that I use for various game servers, VMs and an Emby server. As far as I am aware, ARK servers rely heavily on single core performance so you're in a bit of a bind in terms of getting great performance per core and a high thread count. I don't have a huge amount of experience with Xeons but I can vouch for the x5690. I have yet to hit my system with anything and really feel it chug. Also keep in mind that if you're going to be multiple servers and VMs you're going to need a good amount of ram as well.

[NelizMastr]

Keep in mind those companies also do backups, support and patching for you and you don't need to pay for maintenance cost of your own hardware and electricity.

 

While the Westmere Xeons (X56xx) are cheap to buy, the higher end chips are also very power hungry. You're probably fine with a single high core count machine

from one generation up. Something like an E5-2650v2 or higher. Efficient, high performance and reasonably cheap. I can only vouch for HP servers, so something

that would work well here is an ML350p Gen8, and add cheap DDR3 ECC registered memory to it. DIY is also an option.

[Lipe123]

You're almost always better off with a hosted server online if you don't require a lot of storage space. The cost per month might look like a lot but even a cheapo used server on ebay will buy you typically a year's worth of hosting in the cloud.

 

What about your internet connection, if you want to host more than one instance of anything you're going to need good upload speeds like 50mbs+ I'm not sure how it works where you are but residential internet plans here are not symmetrical, my 300mbs connection only has an upload of 15mbs. 

 

Assuming you have good internet and power is cheap where you live then you could look for used servers on Ebay/similar sites.

CPU:

You need to figure out a cpu you can afford that will work, use a list like this: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php  and search for xeons that have a decent clock speed 3ghz+. You should be able to maybe get something like an E5-1650 V2/3 type server for < $1000. 

If your game server software has decent multi threading support then you could get away with slower clocked chips with more cores.

Ram:

Not really an issue, most will come with plenty preinstalled, if not ram isn't too expensive.

Storage:

Here you are going to struggle again, most servers will come with 10k rpm SAS drives and some will be sata compatible and others not.

You will probably want to set up new SSD drives in the gaming server you plan to do, while servers have pretty reliable hdd's they are still not super fast and old servers are bound to have some bad drives. Not to mention shipping will add more variables. 

So make sure you get a server that can handle regular SATA drives and can handle at least 4 drives or more. This way you get get 4 1Tb SSD drives and setup something like a basic RAID 5 array to give you 3 TB of storage to play with and some failure redundancy.

Software:

Use free VM software like proxmox, its pretty easy to setup and then try to use free OS's for hosting game servers where possible. Most game servers have linux versions so you don't need to go buy windows for each game you host. Also Linux has much lower overheard so your resources go further.

The older servers will come with a windows 2008R2 or windows 2012 server edition license sticker on them so that might at least get you one "free" windows os if your games can run on server edition.

Also proxmox lets you share all the cpu cores with all the vm's and it will handle allocating tasks to lesser used cores automatically if you check the correct boxes and whatnot.