[Lienetic]

I do actually have an old computer that I use as basic home server but it can't support meaningfully heavy loads. For a Palworld dedicated server, I'd need something with 4 cores and 16gb which seems to cost ~$500 (e.g. for a NUC).

In comparison, all of these game server hosting sites charge ~$20/month, notably cheaper than that or hosting with any cloud host.

They also "manage it for you" which for us technical people is probably more of a con than a pro but honestly is fine for a game server as long as it works and allows reasonable access (most seem to at least let you FTP in).

I'm open to a better alternative if you have any suggestions

[seangrogg]

FWIW I was previously using a host that at ~$24 was providing 8gb RAM which sounded okay, but that resulted in lots of lag, rubber-banding, and resulted in OOM errors roughly every 2-3 hours that brought the server down.

I put about an hour into setting up something off of my own machine which has memory to spare and the server has been running for ~5 days excluding the rare points where I intentionally brought the server down to change settings.

EDIT: I had to do roughly the same amount of "server management" in both cases but with the host I had to use their (not really intuitive or friendly) UI whereas with my machine I get my terminal. The host had some niceties for handling really simple things (server name, server password) but if you wanted to do anything they didn't cover (egg hatch rate, building deterioration rate, etc) you would have to edit configuration files... just with their tooling.

[Lienetic]

This is compelling; the lag and crashes are the reason I am looking to self host anyways.

What specs are your machine? I'm trying to figure out what I can get that would be sufficient enough to switch off.