Valheim: hosting from your own PC vs a rented server

For two or three friends who always play together, hosting Valheim from inside the game on one of your own PCs is fine and costs nothing. The moment the group wants to play when the host is not online, has more than four or five people, or includes somebody on a slow connection, a dedicated server becomes worth it - and then the choice is between running one at home and renting one. Home hosting works if you have a machine that can stay on, a decent upload speed and a real public IP address; it fails quietly behind carrier-grade NAT and turns your home connection into everybody's connection. A rented server costs a few dollars a month and removes those problems, at the price of not owning the box. The rest of this post puts numbers on each of those trade-offs.

The three ways to host Valheim#

Valheim gives you three distinct setups, and people often mix them up:

In-game hosting is what you get when you start a world and tick the option to start a server. Your copy of the game becomes the server. Friends join through Steam, through a crossplay join code, or by your address if you have set up port forwarding.

A dedicated server at home is the free valheim_server application (Steam app id 896660), running on your own PC or on a spare machine. It has no graphics, loads one world and keeps it running whether or not anybody is playing. It is the same software a host runs. What a dedicated game server is explains the general idea.

A rented server is that same application on someone else's hardware, with a panel to manage it.

The second and third use identical software and identical world files. Moving between them is a matter of copying two files, which matters later.

What in-game hosting really costs the host#

In-game hosting is easy, and for a small, regular group it is the right answer. Its costs are real, though, and they all land on one person.

• The world exists only while the host plays. Nobody can log in alone to tend the farm or smelt ore. For groups on different schedules, this is usually the reason to move.
• The host's machine does two jobs. It renders the game for the host and also stores and relays the world for everybody else. On a modest PC the host loses frame rate, and the effect grows with the number of players and the size of the bases.
• The host's connection is everybody's connection. Every other player's traffic goes through the host's upload. A host on a weak connection makes the whole group rubber-band.
• The world is stored with the host's saves. If they lose the PC, or the Steam Cloud copy goes wrong, the world goes with it. Make sure somebody keeps a copy.

There is one thing in-game hosting does well that is easy to underestimate: joining through Steam friends tends to work without any port forwarding, because Steam's networking can route the connection for you. That is a large part of why it is the default for small groups.

Valheim's zone system softens the performance cost a little. The world is divided into zones, and each zone is simulated by the first player who enters it, not by the host. So the host is not running every monster in the world; they are storing it, relaying it, and simulating whatever zones they own. This is also why a dedicated server does not cure every kind of lag: a player on a bad connection still simulates the zones they walk into, wherever the server lives.

Upload speed: the number that decides home hosting#

For any home setup, in-game or dedicated, the figure that matters is upload, not download. Most home connections are asymmetric, and many have a small fraction of their download speed available upstream.

Valheim is not a heavy user of bandwidth. A rough figure is 50-150 KB/s per connected player at busy moments, which is roughly 0.4-1.2 Mbit/s. That gives:

The headroom matters because the server is not the only thing using the line. Somebody streaming video, a game download, a cloud backup or a video call will all compete with the game. Upload is where home connections become congested first, and when the upstream link is full, latency rises for everybody, including the people in the house.

Latency is the other half. Players connecting to a home server pay for the route to your house; players connecting to a rented server pay for the route to the data centre. Neither is automatically better, but a home connection adds the latency of your own last mile to every packet, and Wi-Fi on the server machine adds jitter. If you host at home, use a cable. Latency, jitter and packet loss explains how to tell which of the three you are seeing.

Port forwarding and CGNAT#

A dedicated server at home needs incoming UDP on the game port and the port above it, 2456 and 2457 by default. On a typical home network that means a port-forwarding rule on the router pointing at the server's local address, plus permission in the operating system's firewall. The Valheim ports explained covers the range and running more than one world.

Forwarding is only possible if your router has a real public address. Many ISPs now put customers behind carrier-grade NAT, where many households share one public address and nobody can receive unsolicited incoming connections. Quick test: compare the WAN address on the router's status page with what an "what is my IP" site reports. If they differ, or the router shows an address in 100.64.0.0/10, you are behind CGNAT and no setting on your router will open a port.

Your options behind CGNAT:

1. Use crossplay. A server started with -crossplay is reached through the PlayFab relay with a join code, which does not need an open port. It works, but adds a hop and depends on a service you do not control.
2. Ask the ISP. Some will give you a public address on request, sometimes for a fee.
3. Use a tunnel. A VPN or tunnel to a machine with a public address can forward the ports, but you are now paying for and maintaining that machine as well. Tunnels and proxies for game servers covers the options.
4. Rent the server instead. Which is often cheaper than option 3.

NAT and CGNAT for game hosts and port forwarding vs hosted servers go further into both.

Uptime, power and the cost of running at home#

A dedicated server is only useful if it is on. At home, that means a machine running all day and night, and that has a cost.

To work out yours, multiply the machine's average power draw by the hours in a month and by your electricity price:

watts / 1000 x 730 hours x price per kWh = monthly costExample: a desktop averaging 70 W70 / 1000 x 730 = 51 kWh a month51 kWh x 0.30 per kWh = about 15 a month in your currency

The example numbers are illustrative; measure your own machine with a plug-in meter if you can, because a gaming PC with a powerful graphics card idles far higher than a small low-power box. A spare mini PC or an old laptop drawing 10-20 W is much cheaper to leave on and is plenty for a small Valheim group. A full gaming desktop left on purely to host is often the most expensive way to run the server.

Other costs of home uptime:

• Updates and reboots. Your operating system restarts for updates, usually at a bad moment. The server has to start again on its own afterwards, which means setting it up as a service. On Linux that is a systemd unit; on Windows, a service wrapper. The Windows install guide and the SteamCMD Linux install both cover it.
• Power cuts. A cut ends the process without a save, losing everything since the last one. A UPS fixes this; most people do not have one.
• You are the support desk. When the server is down at midnight, the group messages you.
• Wear. A machine running every hour of the year wears fans and disks faster. It is not dramatic, but it is not free either.

A rented server shifts all of that to the host. The trade-off is that you depend on them: their maintenance, their prices, their one location.

Your IP address and your home network#

Running a server at home means every player who connects learns your home IP address. For a group of friends, that is usually fine. For anything public, it is worth thinking about.

What an IP address gives away is mostly approximate location (often only city or region level) and a target. The realistic risk for a small server is not hacking, it is being knocked offline. Somebody who falls out with the group and has your address can pay for a flood that takes your whole household's internet down, not just the game. Your ISP's response is usually to wait it out. IP leaks and doxxing for server owners covers what an address reveals and what it does not.

A home server also sits on the same network as your family's laptops and phones. A well-maintained dedicated server is not a large risk, but it is one more machine with an open port, and mods are code that runs on it. Valheim server security and privacy goes through how to lock either kind of server down.

On a rented server, the address players see is the host's, and floods land on the host's network instead of yours. On RE:NODE that means upstream filtering that drops obvious volumetric floods; attacks that look like real players are not filtered, and no host can honestly promise otherwise.

When each one is the right answer#

Taking all of that together:

• Host in-game when there are two to four of you, you always play together, and the host has a reasonable PC and connection.
• Run a dedicated server at home when you want the world always available, you have a low-power machine you can leave on, a public IP address, and at least 10 Mbit/s of upload, and you are happy to be the administrator. It is also the right way to learn how the server works.
• Rent a server when you are behind CGNAT, your upload is weak, the group is five or more, people play at different times, or you simply do not want a computer running in your house all year.

Some groups do both in sequence: start in-game, then move the world to a dedicated server when the schedule stops lining up. That transition is painless because the world is just a .fwl and a .db file. Uploading a local world to a server walks through it, including worlds that were hosted in-game and stored in Steam Cloud.

For the general version of this comparison across games, see self-hosting at home vs renting and the cheapest way to host a server for friends.

What a rented Valheim server should give you#

If you rent, the things worth checking are not the headline RAM figure alone:

RE:NODE Valheim plans start from 2 GB, with crossplay on, a password generated for you, both UDP ports allocated, SFTP and an in-browser file manager, and backup slots on every plan with restore as one button. The servers are in one place, Germany, which suits groups in Europe and is a longer trip for players elsewhere - check the ping from where your group lives before you pay.

FAQ#

Can I host a Valheim dedicated server on the same PC I play on?

Yes. The dedicated server is a separate program and can run alongside the game. You join your own server by its local address. The cost is that your PC now runs both, so your frame rate drops while you play, and the server stops when you turn the PC off.

Do friends need to port forward to join me?

They do not; only the host does, and only for direct connections. Steam friend joins and crossplay join codes generally work without forwarding because the connection is routed for you. Joining by IP and appearing in the community list need the ports open on your side.

How much upload speed do I need to host Valheim at home?

Plan for at least 5 Mbit/s for a small group and 20 Mbit/s for ten players, after whatever else your household uses. Valheim itself needs well under that, but upload is the first thing to congest on a home line.

Is a rented server faster than hosting at home?

It is usually steadier rather than faster: a data-centre connection does not slow down when somebody at home starts a video call, and the server does not share a CPU with a game. Lag caused by a player on a poor connection owning a zone happens on any server.

Can I move my world from home hosting to a rented server later?

Yes. Copy the world's .fwl and .db files from your save folder to the server's worlds_local folder, set the world name to match, and start it. Characters stay on each player's machine, so nobody loses their gear.