So you want to run your own game server. Good news: it's easier than it's ever been. Bad news: there are still a dozen ways to make your future self miserable. We've stood up more of these than we can count, for our own communities and for other people's, so here's the long version of what we tell everyone who asks.
Start with hardware, and be honest about your player count. Size for the twelve mates who'll actually show up on Friday night, not the two hundred subscribers you're dreaming about. You can always move a world to a bigger box later. You can't get back the money you sank into a machine that idles at three percent.
The number that matters most surprises people: single-core speed, not core count. Most game servers still simulate the world on one main thread. Minecraft ticks its overworld on a single core, Factorio's update loop is famously single-threaded, and Valheim won't spread itself across your fancy sixteen cores either. A modest CPU with fast cores will outrun a server-grade chip full of slow ones for almost every game we host. RAM is the easier call, and rough guidance goes a long way: vanilla Minecraft is comfortable around 4GB, a heavily modded pack wants 8 to 10, Valheim lives happily in 4, and Rust will take 16GB with a decent sized map and not apologise. Whatever you pick, put the world data on an SSD. Spinning disks make chunk loading and world saves stutter in ways players absolutely notice, and no amount of CPU makes up for it.
Next, the network, because latency kills communities faster than bugs do. Bandwidth is the part everyone overestimates. Most games send surprisingly little data, on the order of tens to a few hundred kilobits per player, so the connection size rarely matters. What hurts is ping and jitter. A player sitting on 250ms is teleporting through melee fights and losing every duel, and they won't file a bug report about it. They'll just quietly stop logging in. Host in the same region as your players. Australians who've done time on American servers already know exactly what that feels like, and it's a big part of why we host in Adelaide.
If you're hosting from home, three things will bite you. Port forwarding is fiddly but documented for every game under the sun. CGNAT is worse: some ISPs don't hand out a real public IP at all, and you'll need to ring them and ask for one. And upload speed is the sneaky one, because that "100 down" plan might be 20 up, and upload is the direction a server actually cares about. A cheap VPS or a proper host makes all three problems disappear, which is worth weighing against the electricity bill of the old PC in the cupboard.
Before you invite a single player, sort out backups and access. Automated backups on day one, not after the first corrupted world. Daily at minimum, kept for a couple of weeks, with at least one copy that doesn't live on the same machine as the server. Then restore one on purpose to prove the process works, because an untested backup is just a rumour with a timestamp.
On the access side: change the default RCON and control panel passwords before the server ever faces the internet, keep the game and its mods patched, and don't run any of it as root. If the game supports a whitelist, leave it on while you're building. Public game servers get found by scanners within hours of going online, and a forgotten admin password is still the most common way a community loses everything it built.
The last piece isn't technical at all. Write the server rules somewhere players can actually find them, pick one or two admins you trust, and be upfront about restart schedules and wipes. A wipe that's announced two weeks out is an event people plan around. A surprise wipe is how you lose half the population overnight.
On the software side, resist plugin hoarding. Every mod and plugin costs tick time, and the difference between a snappy server and a sluggish one is usually the twenty plugins somebody installed in week one and forgot about. None of this is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a server that lasts years and one that dies in a month.
Day two is its own job, and it's the one nobody warns you about. Games patch constantly, and a server that lags behind the client version is a server nobody can join, so decide upfront how updates happen: automatically overnight, or manually after you've checked the mod ecosystem survived the patch. Modded servers especially deserve caution, because one mod that hasn't updated yet can hold your whole world hostage. Schedule a regular restart while you're at it. Most game servers leak memory slowly, and a 5am daily restart costs nothing while quietly fixing the "it gets laggy after a few days" complaint before anyone makes it.
It's also worth setting up some basic monitoring, even something as simple as an uptime check that pings the server and messages you when it stops answering. Players will always notice an outage before you do, but there's a real difference between "the admin already knows and it's coming back" and a Discord channel full of question marks at midnight.
Once you're live and stable, performance tuning is where the real fun starts: tick rates, view distances, garbage collector flags, the annual plugin audit. We'll dig into specific games in future posts. And if you'd rather skip the homework entirely and go straight to playing, hosting these things is literally what we do.