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Lienetic
Do you have any personal recommendations on a good/affordable cloud host for this?

I briefly looked into how much it'd cost to run on an EC2 instance and it seems like it'd be order of $100 - $200 per month while these dedicated game server companies seem to be offering it, fully managed, for only $20/mo! I'm guessing they do this by having larger instances running many people's servers?

I'd prefer to manage and run this myself but when the price is an order of magnitude more to do so, it doesn't seem worth it to self host unless you happen to have a suitable always on home server sitting around.

shepherdjerred
Having a physical server at home is quite useful! Just start with an old desktop/laptop and go from there. At $100/mo, you can build a decent home server from scratch and break even in just a few months.
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.