Have you ever been playing an online game, either by yourself or with some friends, and you’ve been fed up with the server that you’re playing on? It might be ridiculously high ping, annoying people in your lobby taking the fun out of the game, or you might even just be unhappy with how vanilla the server you’re on is.

Whatever the reason, you don’t have to settle for the official game servers provided by the developers (for most games) if you want to have more of a custom experience when gaming, from modding capabilities to setting caps on the number of players in your lobby.

Still, you’re certainly not short of choice in terms of the range of game server hosting providers available on the market, so throughout this article, we’re going to be walking through our six favourite options to cover a variety of different games or other requirements.

To kick things off, though, let’s walk through a little bit of background information so you’ll be able to make a more informed choice later in the article:

In the most simple terms, this is basically just an opportunity to control your own gaming experience rather than having to rely on any given game developer’s servers.

So, whether you like playing relatively low resource-intensive games like Minecraft or you’re more of a Counter-Strike player, you’re the one in charge of configurations/mods/rules etc.

In essence, you’re renting a dedicated server from a provider whenever you set up a game server, and these are kept in data centres around the world – equipped with the necessary hardware and high-speed internet connections needed to ensure smooth gameplay.

Once your server is up and running, players from around the world can join your game. They connect to your server, experiencing live games with low latency, thanks to the efficient setup. And, since you’ve got full access to all of the server settings, you can customise the experience to your liking, from game modes to player limits and beyond.

Now that you’ve got a better understanding of what you can expect with game server hosting let’s explore our the six best options we found:

Pros

• Supports a range of different games.
• You can customise your hosting plan to include or exclude certain features.

Cons

• It can feel slightly laggy if your server is heavily modded.
• Not the most clear refund policy.

Pros

• Supports plenty of games.
• Tailor your hosting plans so they match your needs.

Cons

• Latency can be slightly poor in certain continents despite the global coverage they provide.

In addition, once you’ve paid for your server, it’ll actually go live pretty much instantly, so you can get your game up and running without having to sit through any unnecessary onboarding processes.

Pros

• Plenty of support for over 20 popular game servers.
• Excellent hardware with AMD processors and NVME storage so your servers run effortlessly.

Cons

• Even some dedicated servers can experience performance issues if you want a particularly high number of players in your game.
• The three-day trial period is far from enough time to get a proper feel for the service.

Pros

• Supports a range of different games, not just Palword.
• Comes with a malware scanner to keep your server safe.

Cons

• Fairly convoluted process if you want to switch server locations.
• Relatively expensive in comparison to some of their competitors.

Finally, they also throw in some additional features with their hosting plans, like their LiteSpeed web server option, for even better performance.

Pros

• Very little latency thanks to their 1Gb uplink ports.
• Comes with various different options for backing up your data.

Cons

• ScalaHosting is generally one of the most expensive game hosting providers available due to the player base size it’s meant to cater for.

Pros

• Impressively high number of supported games and plugins.
• Unlikely to lose data thanks to their specialised in-house backup system.

Cons

• Comes with additional fees if you want your server to be located in a particular region.
• Very inadequate refund policy with only one day to test out the service.