Valheim: rent, VPS or home host, with the costs worked through

Which way fits your group?

The right route for a Valheim group depends on when people play and who will look after the server.

What size are you pricing?

A Valheim server for a small group is usually priced at 4 to 8 GB here, because hosts publish those estimates and the developer publishes none. Iron Gate's dedicated-server guide (dated 11 April 2024) gives no RAM or CPU figure. Host Havoc says about 4 GB for 2 to 5 players, and its blog says "2 cores minimum, 4 recommended". Its plan page says to plan for "4 fast cores and 4 to 8 GB". The sizing detail is in Valheim server requirements.

Host Havoc says Valheim supports 10 simultaneous players per world, and Indifferent Broccoli's plans also stop at 10. Iron Gate's guide states no limit. If those hosts are right, paying for more than 10 slots buys nothing.

Option 1: renting a Valheim server

Renting a Valheim server costs a fixed monthly fee, listed below as shown on 8 November 2026, before tax, promotions and add-ons.

Sources: Sparked Host, Host Havoc, Indifferent Broccoli, DatHost. File access and mod support differ by host, "uncapped" is qualified by fair use, and none of these pages publishes verified uptime. Before paying, confirm you can upload a whole world folder by FTP or file manager, because that is your route in and out.

Option 2: a VPS or dedicated box

A VPS is a rented virtual machine you set up yourself, so you pay less for the box and more in effort. Host Havoc gives 2 cores as the minimum and recommends 4, so Hostinger's 1 vCPU plan is below that line and its 2 vCPU plan sits on the minimum.

Sources: Hostinger, Hetzner. Hostinger's lowest prices sat under a Black Friday banner and need a 24-month prepayment. Renewing KVM 2 for the same term would cost $359.76 ($14.99 × 24), against $210.96 the first time. Hetzner showed no stock when read. Whether either runs Valheim well is not established here, and neither provider's rules on game servers were reviewed.

What you take on: Iron Gate lists the Linux packages libatomic1, libpulse-dev and libpulse0, a minimum of GLIBC_2.29 and GLIBCXX_3.4.26, and a Docker script for older systems. It also warns that the start script is reset each time Steam updates it, so edit a copy. A VPS has its own public address, so CGNAT at home stops mattering and your home address stays private.

Option 3: your own PC

A home-hosted Valheim server costs electricity you can calculate yourself, plus upkeep. Use this formula with your own bill:

Monthly electricity = average watts × 730 ÷ 1,000 × your price per kWh.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports an average residential price of 18.16 cents per kWh for August 2026, a preliminary figure (EIA). The 730 hours assumes the PC never sleeps.

Example assumptions, replace with your own: the PC averages 40 W or 100 W at $0.1816 per kWh.

• 40 W: 29.2 kWh a month, about $5.30 a month, about $64 a year.
• 100 W: 73 kWh a month, about $13.26 a month, about $159 a year.

Break-even wattage. Divide the rental price by (0.73 × your price per kWh). At $0.1816, electricity alone matches Host Havoc's $9.99 plan at about 75 W ($9.99 ÷ $0.132568) and a $12.99 plan at about 98 W. A higher tariff lowers both figures. GameServerBench has not measured any machine's draw. A plug-in power meter, read while the server runs with players on it, gives you the number to use.

Sellers' estimates vary widely, so treat them as inputs to replace:

A gaming PC's draw "under load" is an upper case, since a server PC does not sit at full load all month. Bandwidth is your own upload speed; Host Havoc budgets about 1 Mbps per player, which is a host's estimate. A PC bought just for hosting adds cost: an example $300 machine over 36 months is about $8 a month.

Worked 12-month comparison for 6 players

Admin time can dominate. With an example $20 an hour and one hour a month, that is $240 a year, more than any line above. Rented plans remove most of it; a VPS or home PC keeps it. Enter your own figures in the rent vs self-host calculator.

Costs that are not money

Self-hosting Valheim trades a monthly fee for these risks and chores.

• Uptime. Pine Hosting, which sells hosting, says in a comparison article that a self-hosted server runs only while the PC and the home connection work. It gives no uptime figure.
• Port forwarding and CGNAT. Iron Gate says the server uses the chosen port and the next one, default 2456-2457. HostedGG and WinterNode, both sellers, say 2456 to 2458, so start with Iron Gate's range. A crossplay server uses a relay and "does not require Port Forwarding", but you cannot join it by local or loopback address. If you use the Steam route behind CGNAT, you cannot forward ports.
• DDoS exposure of a home IP. Players who connect directly learn your home address, and a flood aimed at it can take down the household connection. Rented hosts list protection (DatHost says "up to 2 Tbps"), but those are claims.
• Patches. Host Havoc says clients cannot join on a version mismatch, so someone has to update the server on patch day.
• Saves. Iron Gate's defaults are a save every 30 minutes and four rolling backups, so a power cut can cost up to that interval. Stop the server with CTRL+C; Iron Gate warns that closing the window may leave it running.

Can you switch later?

Yes: a Valheim world moves as files, so a cheap start is not a one-way choice. Iron Gate gives the default save path as %USERPROFILE%/AppData/LocalLow/IronGate/Valheim on Windows and ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim on Linux, and the admin and ban lists live there too. Host Havoc says that Valheim 1.0, which it dates to 9 September 2026, saves each world as a folder of .fwl2, .db2 and chunk files, so copy the whole folder. Iron Gate's guide predates that release, so re-check after a major patch.

Going the other way, download the world before you cancel. Host Havoc's Terms say files are kept "as long as possible" but "the guaranteed amount of time is unspecified".

Next decision: compare host plan structures on the Valheim hosting hub, or settle the RAM question first in Valheim server requirements.