Hosting a game server on Worldstream
Quick answer
A VPS is enough for small communities, testing, and low concurrent player counts. Move to a Dedicated Server for larger persistent worlds, high player counts, or when you need full hardware control for anti-cheat or kernel and network tuning. On the dedicated server listing on worldstream.com, a Gaming use-case shortcut pre-filters the list toward configurations suited to this workload.
What actually matters for game server hosting
Game servers have a different performance profile from most other workloads. A few factors matter more here than raw specs on paper:
- Low, consistent latency to your player base, more than raw throughput. Players notice a laggy connection far more than they notice a slightly slower disk. Where your server sits relative to where your players are matters as much as the hardware itself.
- Single-thread CPU performance. Most game server software is still largely single-threaded per world or per instance, so a CPU with strong per-core performance often serves a game server better than one with more cores at a lower clock speed. See Choosing a CPU for CI/CD, virtualisation and Kubernetes nodes for the general reasoning behind this, the same single-thread logic that applies to databases applies here.
- Enough RAM headroom for player count and world or session data. As concurrent players and world state grow, memory use grows with them. Undersizing RAM shows up as stutter and slow world updates under load, not as an outright crash.
- DDoS protection. Game servers are a common target for denial-of-service attacks, competitive titles especially, so this matters more here than for most other workloads. See Understanding DDoS protection for what protection actually covers.
VPS or Dedicated: which fits your community
| Situation | Fit |
|---|---|
| Small communities, testing, low concurrent player counts | Flexible VPS: quick to provision, resize as the community grows |
| Larger persistent worlds, high player counts | Dedicated Server: consistent performance without sharing hardware with other tenants |
| Anti-cheat or specific kernel/network tuning requirements | Dedicated Server: full hardware control that a VPS abstraction doesn't allow |
For the general trade-offs between the two products beyond gaming specifically, see Choosing between a VPS and a dedicated server.
Using the Gaming shortcut on the dedicated server listing
The dedicated server listing on worldstream.com can be filtered by data centre location, delivery time, uplink speed and processor family. Alongside those filters sit use-case shortcuts, including Gaming, that pre-filter the list toward configurations suited to that workload. See Configuring a dedicated server when you order it for the full walkthrough of the configurator itself.