so I've been playing a lot of PalWorld lately
and I'm not alone over 19 million players have tried PalWorld so far. Many players have been
trying to rent dedicated servers to play in with their friends but hosting providers can't seem to
provide stable servers. Their Discords are full of complaints from users saying their servers are
down or constantly crashing. Why is that? In this video we're going to break down my adventure
with hosting a PalWorld dedicated server and do some quick math to show why hosting companies
are having such a hard time hosting stable PalWorld servers. I had seen clips of PalWorld for
years and to be honest I thought the game was likely to be a scam similar to "The Day Before."
Then PalWorld came out and it was awesome! I played for free on Game Pass but I wanted to play with
others on a dedicated server so I asked in our community Discord who was interested in playing
PalWorld and one of our members recommended our first server provider. We signed up for dedicated
server rental and things went well for the first day. Then the problem started. PalWorld started
to explode in popularity and our server crashed. Then it crashed again. Sometimes it would
come back up quickly but sometimes it would stay down for quite a while. My friends and I
are tech people so we knew it wouldn't take much effort for us to host the server ourselves. My
good friend Solrac offered to temporarily host the server on his Linux laptop until we were able
to find a permanent home. Things went great. Our server occasionally crashed, possibly due to a
rumored memory leak in the Linux version of the PalWorld dedicated server. Luckily, Solrac is smart
and wrote a script so that whenever the server crashed it would come right back up. Additionally,
we monitored the server memory and preemptively rebooted it when memory was approaching capacity.
Things were great but this was only a temporary solution. We didn't want to rely on a spare
computer at someone's house. I had an active server with another hosting company. This was for
my ARK server, but since nobody was playing on it I decided to try and load PalWorld onto it.
The performance was not great. I was constantly rubber banding and teleporting around. It was
clear this company would not be our permanent home. Hearing that every hosting provider we could
think of was having similar issues we looked into renting a physical server in a data center with
about 64 GB of RAM. This time we set up on Windows Server as there were rumors Windows didn't have
a memory leak issue. the Windows server has been running flawlessly. Once memory hits 32 GB of
consumption it stays right at 32 GB consumed. Unfortunately, the 32 GB remains dedicated
to the PalWorld server even after everyone has signed off for the night. This is abnormal because
you wouldn't expect an empty server to consume the same resources as a full server. This
brings us to why hosting providers are having such a hard time with PalWorld. The game needs
at least 32 GB of dedicated memory and this is completely misaligned with how most server hosting
companies do business. You see, game server hosting companies rent extremely powerful computers and
resell small portions of them to their customers. Much like Airlines they assume that not everyone
will be using all of the available resources at all times. However, PalWorld is different.
It consumes those resources, specifically memory whether the server has active players or not. This
has left some server providers scrambling. The quick fix from a server provider standpoint would be to
sell servers that have at least 32 GB of dedicated memory, but is this economically feasible? Let's
take a look. For this exercise I shopped around a bit for dedicated root server rentals and the
best deal I found was approximately $150 a month for a server with 128 GB of RAM. This is roughly
strong enough for four Pal World servers at the recommended allowance of 32 GB. To Break Even
This would mean renting four servers for $37.50 . Nitrado currently charges $39.50 for a 32 slot Pal
World server. This would net them $2 a month. It's just not enough to turn a profit. If we look
at Indifferent Broccoli, their 32-slot PalWorld servers are only $24 a month so they would lose
$13.50 per game server. Now things could be a bit different for hosting providers since they rent so
many servers from data centers it's likely they're getting cheaper rates than I could find but it's
unlikely to be enough of a discount to make this business model feasible. After all, who would want
to pay over $60 for a dedicated server? Especially if you only have four active players. So what's
the long-term fix? There are a few options. Number one: game server hosts could charge way more than
they are charging now and provide dedicated memory to all PalWorld servers. Some hosting
providers already provide this functionality for some games like Minecraft. Going down this path, you'd
expect servers to cost upwards of $60 a month . Number two: PalWorld can reduce the memory
requirements of dedicated servers. It's clear that this is just code optimization that needs to
be done. It's important to remember that this is the first release of an early access game. This
is not a finished product and issues like this are to be expected. Long term this is going to be
the solution. Option number three: game server hosts could find creative solutions. For instance,
one of the providers I'm aware of is rebooting PalWorld servers several times a day. This is a
great way to reset the memory utilization before it slowly builds back up. But at the end of the
day these creative solutions are probably just going to be disruptive workarounds. Well how does
any of this help you as a player? To put it simply , if you need a server running and running well I
can only think of two options. Option number one: boot up a spare PC that has at least 32 GB
of RAM and run a dedicated server on it. You can set up port forwarding on your router that
way your friends can connect. Option number two: you could rent hardware with at least 64 GB
of RAM in a data center, slap Windows Server on it and run PalWorld. This is basically what we've done
and it's been fantastic. Everything's been running great for at least a week. Just don't expect
this option to be cheap! Well, that's it for this video thank you everybody for watching.
If you have any feedback or questions please feel free to leave a comment on this video.
Thanks and I'll see you in the next one, bye
