🇬🇧 UPDATED 2026

Free Vintage Story Server Hosting

Unlike Minecraft, Vintage Story doesn’t have an established ecosystem of free-forever rented hosts. Here’s what “free” genuinely means here — a real trial, or hosting it yourself.

Worth knowing first

Why this looks different to our Minecraft or Terraria free hosting guides

For bigger titles like Minecraft, there’s a well-established tier of genuinely free-forever hosts (Aternos and similar). Vintage Story’s own hosting page acknowledges this directly — it frames the choice as “free local hosting” (self-hosted, on your own network or PC) versus “paid internet hosting,” without a genuine free-forever middle ground. That’s not a knock on the game; it’s simply a smaller community with fewer providers building free tiers around it. What you actually get here is a proper free trial from a real host, or self-hosting for genuine £0.

Our top pick
Indifferent Broccoli
Best free trial for Vintage Story · No card required
2 days free
then from $5.99/mo
Ryzen 9 9950X / 7950X No credit card to start Full mod support

The trial is the real product — same hardware and control panel as paying customers, capped at 48 hours, no payment details needed to activate it. That’s enough time to properly test installing a modpack, invite the people you’ll actually be playing with, and see how the control panel handles day-to-day admin before committing.

Our full ranking for this game puts Kinetic Hosting at #1 on merit, with Indifferent Broccoli, LOW.MS and AleForge close behind — but Indifferent Broccoli’s the one worth starting with specifically because of the genuinely free, no-obligation trial.

The genuinely £0 option

Self-hosting, for real free

Vintage Story’s own wiki lists this as the first option for a reason — the dedicated server software is a free part of your existing game install, no separate download or purchase needed.

Quick sessions

“Open to LAN” or “Open to Internet” from the pause menu — no dedicated server needed at all for a casual weekend. Full steps in our playing with friends guide.

Always-on, self-managed

Run VintageStoryServer.exe from your install folder with a custom --dataPath, forward port 42420, and it’s free forever — just needs your PC on and connected the whole time.

Already got a world going?

You don’t need to start fresh on a dedicated setup — see our guide to bringing an existing world across.

Worth knowing: self-hosting is free in money terms, but not in effort — your connection needs to reliably accept inbound traffic (CGNAT breaks this entirely, no workaround), and you’re responsible for the performance tuning covered in our settings guide and any troubleshooting from our troubleshooting guide yourself, rather than a host’s support team handling it.
Quick comparison

Free trial vs self-hosting

Option Cost Duration Effort Always online?
Indifferent Broccoli trial Free 2 days None — full panel handles it ✅ Yes, for the trial period
Open to LAN/Internet Free forever Unlimited Minimal ❌ Only while you’re playing
Self-hosted dedicated server Free forever Unlimited Moderate — you handle setup & support Only while your PC is on
FAQ

Free Vintage Story hosting — common questions

Not among the providers we’ve verified. Vintage Story’s smaller community means fewer hosts build a dedicated free-forever tier around it the way they do for Minecraft. Indifferent Broccoli’s 2-day trial and self-hosting are the two genuinely free routes we can confirm.
Nothing is charged automatically, since no payment details are collected to start the trial. Upgrade to a paid plan before the 2 days are up to keep the world running; otherwise the trial server simply stops.
Yes, mods cost nothing extra to install on a self-hosted server — the process is identical to a rented one. See our mods guide for the exact steps.
It’s genuinely free in money terms — no software cost, no subscription. The real cost is your time: setting up port forwarding, keeping your PC running, and handling any troubleshooting yourself rather than relying on a host’s support team.
Keep reading

More Vintage Story guides

How to Play With FriendsLAN, internet & dedicated servers Upload an Existing WorldBring your solo save across Server Settings GuideMaxChunkRadius & more Best Vintage Story Hosting UKCompare all providers
About the author
Linus — author at Game Server Hosting
Linus GSH Founder

SEO & Digital Marketer · Avid survival gamer · Sweden/UK

I'm an avid gamer from Sweden with a lot of time spent in England in the last 5 years who loves survival games — ARK, Palworld, Valheim, Sons of the Forest, V Rising and plenty of WoW and Dota 2 on the side. I created this site to help other gamers find the best server hosting without wasting money on laggy providers.

By day I work in SEO and Google Ads, helping businesses rank and convert. I've been hosting game servers since the Minecraft + Hamachi LAN days and have learned the hard way what separates a good host from a bad one. Every ranking on this site is based on real testing and price-to-performance — no paid placements.

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