Any server
Self-Host vs Rent Cost
Running a game server on a spare PC feels free until the electricity bill arrives. This puts a monthly number on it — power, and the hardware if you bought it for the job — next to the price of a hosted plan, and checks whether your upload can carry the players you expect.
Self-Host vs Rent
What running a server on your own machine really costs per month, next to a hosted plan.
Upload per player varies a lot between games and with view distance and mods; 150 kbps is a rough starting point, not a measurement. Watch your router's traffic during a busy session for the real figure.
Self-hosting per month
€26.30 power + €0.00 hardware
Electricity used
€0.04 per hour online
Upload needed
8% of your upload, before anyone else in the house uses it
Hosting saves
per month, on running costs alone
Not in the number: your time, the machine being unavailable for anything else, uptime while you sleep or travel, a public IP (CGNAT connections cannot host at all), and exposing your home network.
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How the numbers are worked out
Electricity is the machine's draw in watts times the hours it runs, turned into kilowatt-hours per month and multiplied by your tariff. Hardware bought for the server is spread over the months you expect to use it. Upload is the number of players online at once times the upload each one takes; the answer is shown as a share of your connection, because the rest of the household uses the same line.
The formula
- kWh per month = watts × hours per day × 30.44 ÷ 1000
- monthly cost = kWh × price + hardware ÷ months
- upload needed (Mbps) = players × kbps per player ÷ 1000
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Common mistakes
Measure the power draw rather than reading it off the power supply label — a 650 W PSU in a machine that draws 90 W under a game server costs 90 W. And the monthly figure leaves out the things that usually decide it: whether your connection has a public IP at all, the server being down whenever the PC is, and opening your home network to the internet.