The short answer: every server gets a whole flagship gaming core that nothing else touches, on hardware we stress-test before it carries your save, and you can verify both claims on our live status page. The long answer takes a few minutes and will make you better at buying hosting from anyone, including not-us.
A game server is a program that must finish a fixed chunk of simulation (a tick) on a strict schedule, usually 20–60 times a second, for hours at a stretch. Web hosting is bursty and forgiving; game hosting is a metronome. When people say a server "feels bad," they're describing missed ticks: rubber-banding, delayed hits, blocks that reappear. Three things determine whether ticks make their deadline: single-thread CPU speed (most game loops run on one thread), cache (tick loops are memory-access-bound; big L3 helps more than clock), and whether that CPU is actually yours. RAM matters only in that too little is fatal; beyond "enough," more does nothing. Remember that; the entire budget end of this industry is priced on the one resource that stops mattering first.
The standard budget-host model: buy big boxes, split each CPU into threads, sell every thread several times over, and price the plan by RAM, because RAM is the one number that's cheap to provision and easy to print on a pricing card. The market clusters around $2.50–3 per GB/month. The mechanism that makes it profitable is oversubscription: the bet that your neighbors aren't playing when you are. On Saturday night, everyone loses that bet together.
This is the single most-repeated complaint in game-hosting reviews: inconsistent TPS with plenty of advertised RAM, support tickets answered with restart tutorials, and the quiet fact that a "plan" tells you nothing about node occupancy. Even the biggest hosts with decent average ratings carry a stubborn double-digit percentage of one-star reviews, and they nearly all read the same: "laggy with four players and barely any mods." That's not bad luck. It's the business model.
Nothing below is exotic. It's what you'd do for your own hardware, which is the point.
We charge $29.99/core/month, more than a budget 8GB plan. Here's the honest math on what the difference buys. A ~$21 budget plan gets you 8GB of RAM and an undisclosed share of a contended core; when the node is busy, your tick rate is whatever's left over. Ours gets you a whole physical core, pinned, on a flagship gaming CPU (the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X) that passed a full burn-in and gets revalidated yearly, plus RAM sized to your actual game, off-site restore-tested backups, placement on the node nearest your players, and a status page that shows the node's real headroom so you can audit the no-oversell claim any hour of any day. The budget plan is cheaper per gigabyte. Ours is cheaper per playable evening, the resource you were actually trying to buy.
And if a fixed monthly server is more than your group needs: run it ad hoc: a $2.99/mo base keeps your save stored and instant wake armed, and the meter only runs when someone actually plays. Weekend crew? Stop it Sunday night; the save waits, the meter doesn't. Taking a break entirely? Park the server for 99¢ a month and your world stays safely stored until you're ready to come back. And if you cancel outright, we keep your data for 3 months before deletion, so a change of heart (or a new season of your game) never costs you the save. No budget host offers any of that, because their economics need your idle months.
A game server provider rents you a slice of a machine that runs your game world 24/7, so your group can play without one person leaving a PC on. What varies wildly between hosts is what that 'slice' really is: a whole dedicated CPU core, or a shared thread contended by dozens of strangers' servers.
Because RAM was never the bottleneck. Most survival and sandbox games run their main simulation on a single CPU thread with a fixed time budget per tick (Minecraft: 20 ticks/second, 50ms each). If the core your server sits on is shared and busy, ticks miss their budget and you get rubber-banding and delayed block-breaking, no matter how much RAM the plan advertises. A 6GB plan on a crowded node still feels bad; the fix is an uncontended fast core, not more gigabytes.
Overselling is packing more tenants onto a CPU than it can serve at peak, betting they won't all be busy at once. Your server's performance then depends on strangers' schedules: fine at 3am, painful on Saturday night, which is exactly when your group plays. It's the #1 complaint pattern across game-hosting reviews, and it's invisible on the order page: two '8GB plans' can differ by 10x in real tick headroom.
A vCPU is a bookkeeping unit, commonly one thread of a core, shared with other customers at an oversubscription ratio the host doesn't publish. A dedicated physical core is silicon that belongs to your server alone. Game tick loops are single-thread-bound, so this one distinction outweighs every other line on the spec sheet.
Budget hosts price by RAM; the market clusters around $2.50–3/GB/month, so an 8GB plan runs ~$20–25. That looks cheap because RAM is cheap; the number hides what core share you get. We price the thing that actually determines performance: a whole dedicated core ($29.99/core/month) with RAM sized to your game on top. Comparing per-gigabyte prices across the two models tells you nothing. Compare what happens to tick rate when the node gets busy.
High single-thread performance, and for cache-bound tick loops (Minecraft, Valheim), large L3 cache helps more than raw clock. That means flagship desktop Ryzen, the same silicon you'd build a gaming PC around, not the many-core, lower-clock server chips most VPS fleets run. Every NecroHost game node runs the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, burned in before it serves anyone.
Public PvP servers attract attacks; small private co-op worlds rarely do, but the risk isn't zero. Rather than a badge, here is exactly what runs on every node, so you can judge it yourself. Only the ports your server actually uses are reachable and everything else is dropped. Each game port is rate-limited per source address, and query ports are held to the threshold Valve itself recommends, so a NecroHost server can't be used to amplify an attack at somebody else. Malformed packets are dropped before they reach your world. The management plane, the daemon and SFTP, isn't on the public internet at all; it's reachable only across our private encrypted mesh. And every node's traffic is sampled once a minute, with alerts on flood signatures. Above that, the data centre scrubs traffic at the network level and our locations are covered, so the ordinary volumetric attacks are handled before they reach your world, at no extra cost. If you run a 100-plus player community that gets attacked as a matter of routine, a premium host's protected tier with an SLA behind it is the better buy, and we would rather say so here than sell you something that will not hold.
Yes, deliberately so. Standard server images, real SFTP access to every file, and off-site backups you can download. Your world is yours; leaving should be a copy, not a hostage negotiation. Hosts that make export hard are telling you something about how they plan to keep you.
Web hosting serves pages: bursty, cache-friendly, forgiving of shared CPU. Game hosting runs a real-time simulation that must complete every tick on schedule for hours. Infrastructure built for web workloads (most generic VPS) is the wrong shape for game ticks; it fails exactly at peak, when everyone's online.
Every game server is pinned to its own whole physical core: not a thread, not a share. The node keeps a published core budget and refuses new servers past it. Our status page shows real free capacity per node, live, so 'no oversell' is checkable rather than a slogan.
Yes, two ways. On ad-hoc billing ($2.99/mo base) the server sleeps between sessions automatically; your save is stored, instant wake stays armed, and the runtime meter only ticks while the server is actually up. Taking a whole season off? Park it for 99¢ a month: your world stays stored for as long as you like, and you unpark it when everyone's back (subject to available capacity, like a new order). No re-setup, no lost save, no paying full price for a world nobody's in.
Your server is stopped and your data is kept for 3 months before it's permanently deleted. During that window you can export everything over SFTP in standard formats, or come back and pick up where you left off. After 3 months the world and its backups are gone for good, so grab anything you want to keep. If you'd rather not lose the world at all, parking for 99¢ a month keeps it stored indefinitely.
Game hosting splits three ways, and it is worth being clear about which part of it we are arguing with. The budget end sells a share of a thread, several times over. The good hosts at the premium end sell a share of a carefully managed pool, and stop filling a box long before it hurts. That is a real improvement, and it is still shared silicon. We sell the core itself. The premium end is the honest competition, so this table is scored against them rather than against the easy target.
| Big-budget GSPs | Premium GSPs | NecroHost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What the CPU actually is | A share of a thread, sold several times over. | A share of a pool. Faster silicon and fewer neighbours than budget, still shared. | A whole physical core and its SMT sibling, reserved. Nothing else runs on it. |
| When your neighbours are busy | You slow down. This is the Saturday-night problem. | Better odds than the budget end, but you are still sharing the silicon. | Nothing happens. Their load is not on your core. |
| When your neighbours are idle | You may get a little more than you paid for. | Your server bursts into the spare headroom. Genuinely useful, and something a fixed core cannot do. | You get the core you bought and not a cycle more. That is the trade for the row above. |
| Can you check the occupancy claim? | No figure published. | Sometimes a stated policy. Almost never a number you can look at. | Live free cores per node on our status page. Not a policy, a figure you can refresh. |
| What you are billed for | Player slots or RAM: the resource that stops mattering first. | Usually RAM or slots, monthly, running or not. | A flat rate per core with 8 GB bundled, or metered by the hour if your group does not play around the clock. |
| What a weekend group actually pays | The monthly rate, running or not. | The monthly rate, running or not. | $2.99/mo plus $0.13 an hour while it is actually up. Twelve hours a week works out around $9.83 a month, on a dedicated core, and 99¢/mo to park the world between seasons. Metered stops being the cheaper option somewhere past 100 hours a month. |
| DDoS protection | Enterprise-grade, included. | Often included, and usually stronger: a protected tier with an SLA behind it, which is what a 100-plus player community should want. | Included: upstream network scrubbing at the data centre, and per-source rate limits on every node. |
| The control panel | A generic settings form. | A good generic panel, often stock Pterodactyl. | A panel built per game: live metrics, history, and the settings that matter surfaced. |
| Hardware vetting | Not published. | Rarely published. | Burn-in before a box carries anyone, revalidated yearly, certificate on file. |
| Your files | FTP access; scope varies by game and platform. | Full file access. | Standard images and full SFTP on every game. Take the folder anywhere. |
| Catalogue | Large. | Often narrow, and some do one game very well. | Large: 34 games, each with its own tuned profile. |
Two of those rows go against us and several are ties, and we have left them exactly as they fell. If you want burst headroom on a quiet box, or serious DDoS mitigation, a good premium host is the better buy and we would rather you knew that here than found it out after paying us. A comparison table that wins every line is a sales sheet, and you should distrust one when you see it, including ours.