Running a Conan Exiles server at home looks cheaper than renting one. Sometimes it is. But price is never the thing that actually decides it.
A Conan server isn't a program you launch and forget about. It's a machine that has to stay awake, stay patched and stay reachable while you're asleep, at work, or out. That bit never shows up in the maths people do before they start.
When self-hosting is genuinely the right call
Let's get this out of the way, because it's true and nobody selling hosting ever admits it.
You and three mates, a few evenings a week, a private world nobody else touches? Self-host it. You've got a spare PC, you don't care if it's down on a Tuesday, and messing with config files is half the fun. It'll cost you basically nothing and you'll learn a load.
That's a real setup and plenty of people are perfectly happy in it.
It stops working the second other people start counting on your server being up.
Nobody tells you Conan's server is Windows-only
Worth knowing before you buy an old box off marketplace to stick in a cupboard.
Funcom never made a native Linux build of the Conan dedicated server. Windows binaries are the only ones that exist. So if your plan was an old Linux machine or a cheap Linux VPS, you don't just run it. You run it through Proton or Wine, a compatibility layer that lets Windows software work on Linux.
It absolutely works. It's how every Linux-based host runs Conan, us included. But it's a real hurdle, and it's exactly why so many home setups die in the first hour on a baffling "no such file or directory" error. Self-hosting means Windows, or it means learning Proton.
The bill you don't see coming
Conan Enhanced runs on Unreal Engine 5 now and it's hungry. Funcom point at 16 GB of RAM for a 40 player server, and the game leans hard on how fast each core runs rather than how many you've got. That's a whole machine tied up around the clock. Trying to play on the same PC that's hosting a busy server is miserable, so in practice you need a second box, and a decent one.
Then there's your internet. Home lines are built for pulling data down, not pushing it out, so your upload is the real ceiling on player count. You'll be forwarding ports and fighting an IP that changes whenever your router has a moment.
And your IP is the one people underestimate. Hosting from home puts your home connection in front of everyone who joins. On a PvE server with friends, no drama. On a PvP server, where people genuinely will try to knock a rival offline to win a raid, that's your household's internet in the firing line instead of a datacentre's.
After that it's just the grind. Power cuts. Router reboots. Windows updating itself at 3am. Funcom shipping a patch that breaks half your mods. Enhanced servers also creep up on memory the longer they run, so they need restarting or they eventually fill up and get killed. None of it is difficult. It's just yours, every single time, forever.
What you're really paying for when you rent
Hardware that's already the right size. A network and an IP that isn't your house. A proper control panel instead of remote desktop. And someone to shout at when something breaks at a stupid hour.
Whether that's worth it comes down to how much you want your evenings back.
Why people rent Conan servers with us
This is the part we're properly good at, so let me be direct about it.
You choose the RAM, and you can see it before you pay. Most Conan hosting gets sold by player slots, which tells you absolutely nothing about whether the thing will hold together on a busy night. We sell the memory itself, in GB, listed up front. RAM is what decides whether an Enhanced server survives, so that's what you should be buying on. Not a slot count.
Fast cores, because that's what Conan actually wants. Your server runs on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X boosting to 5.7 GHz, with DDR5 and NVMe storage. Conan cares far more about how quick one core is than how many it can see, so that clock speed is what keeps a fight or a purge smooth instead of a slideshow. NVMe matters too, since huge bases load off disk and slow storage turns that into a freeze right when someone's raiding you.
A panel you can actually work in. Console, file manager, SFTP, startup settings. Upload mods, edit configs, pull your world down whenever you fancy. There's a task scheduler in there too, so you can set a daily automatic restart in about thirty seconds and stop worrying about memory creep entirely.
Three backup slots. So when a mod update flattens something, you've got a way back instead of a bad evening.
No slot caps. We don't meter your players. You've got the hardware, you set your own max.
Real support from people who know this game. Open a ticket and you're talking to us, not a queue. There's a Discord alongside it. And there's a three day money-back guarantee, so if it's not what you wanted, you're not trapped.
We do game hosting for a short list of games we genuinely understand instead of a hundred we don't. Conan's one of them, and it shows.
Right, so which
Self-host if it's a handful of mates, you've got a spare machine and nobody minds it dropping now and then. Genuinely, save your money.
Rent the moment your server needs to be up while you're not watching it. Once there are people in your world who aren't you, uptime quietly turns from a hobby into a responsibility. That's the whole line. It's got nothing to do with how technical you are and everything to do with who's depending on you.