Someone else’s computer, running your world, all the time
When you and some friends play a multiplayer game like Minecraft or Valheim, one machine has to actually run the world — track every player, every block, every creature — while everyone else’s game just connects to it and shows what’s happening. That machine is the “server.”
You can run that server yourself, on your own PC, in the background while you play. Or you can rent one from a company that keeps a computer running in a data centre specifically for this. That second option is what “game server hosting” means — you’re renting time and resources on hardware that isn’t in your house.
What you actually get for the money
Self-hosting means the world only exists while your PC is switched on and running the game. A rented server runs continuously in a data centre — your friends can play at 2am on a Tuesday without you needing to leave your computer on.
Self-hosting means opening ports on your home router so the outside world can reach your PC. That’s a real, if usually small, security exposure. A rented server keeps that risk entirely off your own network.
A hosting company’s servers are usually built specifically for running many game worlds well — often better single-core CPU performance than an average gaming PC, which is what most games actually need.
If someone wants to knock your server offline, a home internet connection has essentially no defence against that. A proper hosting provider has infrastructure specifically built to absorb and filter that kind of attack — see our security guide for what that actually involves.
You don’t always need to pay for this
If it’s just you and one or two friends playing occasionally, at times you can coordinate in advance, self-hosting from your own PC is a completely reasonable choice and costs nothing. It genuinely starts to make sense to rent a server once you have a group that plays on their own schedule, you want the world to persist while you’re offline, or your home internet connection and hardware start to visibly struggle under the load.
The general process, regardless of provider
Most hosting providers follow roughly the same flow, even though the exact panel looks different everywhere:
- Pick your game and how many players you expect to support
- Choose a plan sized for that — see our hardware requirements guide if you’re not sure what “enough RAM” actually means for your game
- Pick a server location close to where most of your players actually are
- The provider spins up your server, usually within minutes
- You get connection details (an IP address and port) to share with your group, and a control panel to manage settings, mods and restarts
