Overview
Every guide on hosting a Minecraft, Valheim, Palworld, ARK, or Rust server gives you a different answer to the same question: how much RAM do I actually need? One says 4 GB. Another says 16 GB "just to be safe." A third quotes the official minimums that everyone in the community quietly ignores.
I got tired of the guesswork — so I built a game server sizing calculator with sourced data and honest ranges. It covers the games most people self-host in 2026: Minecraft (Java vanilla, Paper, and modded), Valheim, ARK Survival Evolved and Ascended, Palworld, and Rust.
If you're hosting from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, or anywhere in Eastern Europe, this also tells you which Hostinger Game Panel tier actually fits — Hostinger has Vilnius, Warsaw, and London datacenters, so latency from the Baltics is low single-digit milliseconds.
Key Takeaways
- Modded Minecraft RAM is dictated by the modpack, not the mod count. A 50-mod Create pack uses less RAM than a 30-mod RLCraft install.
- ARK Survival Ascended's official "8 GB minimum" is misleading. Community benchmarks converge on 12–18 GB per map.
- Palworld had a documented memory leak. Pocketpair fixed it in v0.5.3, but residual RAM creep persists — schedule restarts every 4–6 hours.
- Rust RAM scales quadratically with map size. A 6000 worldsize map uses ~3x the RAM of a 3000 map at idle.
- Valheim is hard-capped at 10 players in vanilla. Don't oversize the plan past 10 unless modding heavily.
- CPU clock speed beats core count for every game on this list — all are dominantly single-threaded.
Trying to figure out how much RAM your server actually needs... via GIPHY
The Calculator
Select your game, adjust your settings, and get an instant recommendation. Every result includes the full calculation breakdown.
Configure Your Server
single-thread-bound
RAM scales with view distance squared. Default is 10.
~1 GB per 10 plugins is a useful approximation.
Recommended Configuration
RAM
6–13 GB
vCPU
4
Storage
~20 GB
Game Panel 4 (KVM 4)
Affiliate link — supports DevRunners at no extra cost to you.
Specific to Your Setup
- Aikar's Flags strongly recommended (PaperMC publishes them as canonical baseline) — roughly doubles sustained TPS.
- Set Xms = Xmx (initial heap = max heap) minus 1-1.5 GB OS overhead.
- Dynmap/BlueMap with unbounded render-resolutions can blow heap — cap them.
- TPS target is 20.0; below 18 = noticeable lag, below 15 = unplayable.
Data last verified: 2026-05-10. Numbers are validated quarterly. Major game patches may shift baselines.
How the Calculator Works (Methodology)
Every number in the calculator comes from one of three sources, listed in order of trust:
- Official server documentation from the game developer (Mojang, Iron Gate for Valheim, Studio Wildcard for ARK, Pocketpair for Palworld, Facepunch for Rust).
- Major host published recommendations — Hostinger, Apex Hosting, Shockbyte, BisectHosting, Pingperfect. These tend to skew slightly conservative (read: upsell-biased), so they form the upper bound.
- Community benchmarks from r/admincraft, Steam community forums, uMod, and Hypixel forums. These form the lower bound — what people actually run successfully.
When sources conflict (Studio Wildcard says 8 GB, the community says 16 GB), the calculator reports both with the discrepancy explained. The default recommendation always errs on the side of "won't crash on a busy Saturday night" rather than "minimum that boots."
Data Validated Quarterly
lastVerified timestamp and is re-validated quarterly. Minecraft Java: Vanilla, Paper, and Modded
Minecraft Java has three distinct server profiles that demand wildly different resources. Picking the wrong one is the #1 reason people overpay.
Vanilla
The official Mojang server.jar. Boots fine on 2 GB for testing but realistically wants 3–4 GB for a small SMP and 6–8 GB for 10–20 players. Vanilla is widely considered under-optimized — Paper uses 10–30% less RAM for the same player count, and exposes tunables (mob caps, AI throttling, per-world view distance) that vanilla doesn't.
If you're hosting more than 5 friends, switch to Paper. There's almost no scenario where vanilla server software is the right choice on a hosted machine.
Paper / Purpur / Spigot
The plugin server stack. Paper is the canonical recommendation in 2026, with Purpur as an opinionated fork that adds more configuration knobs. Sweet spot is 8 GB for 10–25 players, scaling to 16 GB for 30–80 player community servers.
Two configuration details matter more than RAM size:
- Aikar's Flags — a JVM configuration that tunes G1GC for Minecraft's allocation patterns. PaperMC publishes them as the canonical baseline. They roughly double sustained TPS under load.
Xms = Xmx— set initial heap equal to max heap, minus 1–1.5 GB for OS overhead. This stops the JVM from constantly resizing its heap.
Always Use Aikar's Flags on Paper Servers
Xms = Xmx to your allocated heap minus 1–1.5 GB OS overhead. Per-plugin RAM cost is roughly 20–100 MB for typical plugins (EssentialsX, LuckPerms, WorldGuard) and 200–500 MB for heavy ones (Dynmap, BlueMap, large CoreProtect histories). Sparked Host's rule of thumb — ~1 GB per 10 plugins — is a usable approximation.
Modded (Forge / Fabric / NeoForge)
This is where most overprovisioning happens, because mod count alone is a terrible predictor. RLCraft (~169 mods) needs roughly the same RAM as Vault Hunters 3 (200+ mods) — both want 8 GB minimum. ATM10 (~400 mods) wants 12–14 GB for 10 players. GregTech: New Horizons (~400 mods) can demand 16 GB+.
The calculator solves this by exposing modpack as an explicit dropdown. The modpack RAM curve table below lists the major packs with sourced RAM floors.
| Modpack | Approx mod count | Recommended heap (server) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light Fabric QoL pack | 20–40 | 4–6 GB | Sodium/Lithium-style optimization mods often *reduce* RAM |
| Better MC (Forge or Fabric) | 100–150 | 6 GB | Visual overhaul, moderate entity load |
| Create: New Age / Above and Beyond | 100–150 | 6–8 GB | Engineering-focused; CPU heavy more than RAM heavy |
| RLCraft 2.9.x | ~169 | 6–8 GB minimum | Hardcore survival, dragons; CPU is the bigger bottleneck |
| Pixelmon Reforged | ~80 | 8–12 GB | Many entities (Pokémon spawning) drive RAM |
| Enigmatica 9 | ~250 | 8–10 GB | Polished kitchen-sink |
| All The Mods 9 (ATM9) | ~400 | 10–14 GB | Tech + magic kitchen sink |
| All The Mods 10 (ATM10) | ~400+ | 12–16 GB | 1.21 baseline |
| Vault Hunters 3 | ~200+ | 8–10 GB | Hard-fails to launch under 8 GB |
| FTB Infinity Evolved (legacy 1.7) | ~200 | 12–16 GB | Older but still actively hosted |
| GregTech: New Horizons | ~400 | 12–16 GB+ | Most demanding mainstream pack |
A few specific notes:
- Forge has higher baseline overhead than Fabric — about 10–20% in benchmarks. NeoForge (1.20.4+) has closed this gap.
- Some packs hard-fail to launch under their minimum. Vault Hunters 3 won't even start with less than 8 GB heap.
- Java 21 with G1GC is mandatory for Minecraft 1.20.5+.
If you're not sure which Minecraft variant fits your needs, the first website hosting guide covers the broader hosting decision (shared vs VPS vs game panel) that applies here too.
Valheim: Iron Gate's Dedicated Server
Valheim is the easiest game on this list to host correctly because it's hard-capped at 10 players in vanilla. The dedicated server tool is well-behaved, the engine is reasonably efficient, and the worst thing that happens is occasional desync if your chunk-master player has a bad connection.
The official Iron Gate wiki claims 2 GB RAM minimum. In practice, fresh worlds use 1.8–2.4 GB at idle, and 6–10 player vanilla servers comfortably run on 4–6 GB. Modded Valheim is where you need headroom — BepInEx is lightweight (~50–100 MB) but content mods like EpicLoot, ValheimPlus, and CreatureLevelAndLootControl can stack to 2–4 GB combined. Add 2–4 GB headroom for any modded server.
One quirk worth knowing: Valheim has unusually high per-player CPU cost because of its chunk-master architecture. One player's client effectively becomes the simulation host for whatever area they're exploring. World generation is bursty and CPU-intensive when players push into new territory. A 4-core CPU at 4 GHz outperforms an 8-core CPU at 3 GHz for this workload.
ValheimPlus has been largely dormant since 2024. Most modded servers in 2026 should run plain BepInEx with individually selected plugins rather than the legacy ValheimPlus all-in-one mod.
ARK Survival Evolved (ASE) and Ascended (ASA)
ARK is the most resource-intensive game on this list, and ASA is significantly more demanding than ASE. They are essentially different games for hosting purposes.
ARK Survival Evolved (ASE)
The original UE4 game. Official documentation says 6 GB RAM minimum, which is honest. One map for 10 players runs comfortably on 8–10 GB, 20–30 players want 12–14 GB, and clusters scale linearly per map. ASE supports Linux natively (unlike ASA), which lowers OS overhead and gives you more deployment flexibility.
Mods stack quickly: 100–500 MB per typical mod, 2–4 GB combined for total conversions like Primal Fear or ARK Eternal. A 5-mod single-map server realistically wants 12–14 GB.
ARK Survival Ascended (ASA)
The UE5 remake. This is where Studio Wildcard's documentation gets misleading.
ARK ASA: Don't Trust the Official Minimum
Three things make ASA hosting harder than ASE:
- Windows-only natively. No Linux server build exists in 2026. Wine/Proton works unofficially but isn't supported.
- Long initial load. Maps spike to 11–16 GB on boot then settle to ~12 GB after stasis kicks in. If you provision based on the steady-state number, your server crashes on startup.
- Cluster RAM compounds fast. Three maps in a cluster realistically wants 48 GB+. Five maps wants dedicated bare-metal hardware, not a VPS.
If you're running ASA, expect to need Hostinger's Game Panel 8 plan (32 GB RAM) for anything serious. Game Panel 4 (16 GB) works for a single map with light mods, but only just.
| Map | Engine | Approx RAM idle | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Island (ASE) | UE4 | 6–8 GB | Smallest, most optimized |
| The Island (ASA) | UE5 | 10–12 GB | Same map, ~2× the RAM in ASA |
| Scorched Earth (ASA) | UE5 | 10–12 GB | Comparable to The Island |
| Aberration (ASA) | UE5 | 11–14 GB | Underground systems add overhead |
| Lost Island (ASA) | UE5 | 12–14 GB | Larger than The Island |
| Valguero (ASA) | UE5 | 13–15 GB | Multi-biome |
| Ragnarok (ASE) | UE4 | 9–12 GB | 144 km², historically heaviest ASE map |
| Ragnarok Ascended (ASA) | UE5.5 | 14–18 GB | Released June 19, 2025; heaviest official ASA map |
| Crystal Isles (ASA) | UE5 | 13–16 GB |
Palworld: The Memory Leak Saga
Palworld is the outlier on this list because its hosting behavior has changed substantially over time. Here's the timeline:
- January 2024 — Launch. Dedicated servers ship with a known memory leak. RAM creeps over hours; servers crash overnight.
- April 9, 2025 — v0.5.3. Pocketpair officially patches the memory leak.
- December 17, 2025 — v0.7 (Home Sweet Home). Quality-of-life patches; community reports indicate residual RAM creep over multi-day uptime.
- 2026 — v1.0 (TBD). Pocketpair has confirmed Palworld 1.0 launches in 2026 with major engine changes. Hosting requirements may shift again.
Palworld Needs Scheduled Restarts
The honest 2026 recommendation: 8 GB for 4-player co-op, 16 GB for 16 players, and schedule restarts every 4–6 hours regardless of plan size.
A few configuration knobs significantly reduce memory pressure:
bEnableInvaderEnemy=Falseremoves a major entity load.- Lowering
DropItemMaxNumfrom 3000 to 500 caps a memory growth vector.
Hostinger's own Palworld tutorial recommends Game Panel 4 (16 GB) for 32 players, which is aggressive — Game Panel 8 (32 GB) is more honest at that player count, especially given Palworld's engine architecture starts to fall apart past 10 active players regardless of hardware.
Rust: World Size Is Everything
Rust's resource model is unusual: map size dominates RAM consumption, scaling roughly quadratically. Player count and plugins are secondary.
Rust World Size Has Quadratic RAM Cost
| worldsize | Idle RAM | Recommended RAM (with players + plugins) |
|---|---|---|
| 2000 | ~3 GB | 6 GB (small group) |
| 3000 (default) | ~4 GB | 8 GB (≤25 players) |
| 3500 (Facepunch-recommended) | ~5 GB | 8–10 GB |
| 4000 | ~6–7 GB | 10–12 GB |
| 4500 | ~7–8 GB | 12–14 GB |
| 5000 | ~8–10 GB | 14–16 GB |
| 6000 (max) | ~10–12 GB | 18–24 GB |
Plugin overhead is comparatively small — 5–50 MB per plugin typically — but stacks to 1–3 GB on plugin-heavy servers (90+ plugins is normal on busy community servers).
Two Rust-specific gotchas:
- Monthly forced wipe (first Thursday) shifts RAM behavior. Usage grows through the month as entities accumulate, then resets on wipe. Provision for the end-of-month peak, not the post-wipe minimum.
- The September 2024 Facepunch update added 3–4 GB to baseline RAM on existing servers. If you see old guides quoting 4 GB minimums, they're stale.
Bandwidth is also unusually high for Rust: community reports suggest 6–8 Mbps outbound per player during peak activity. This rarely matters on a Hostinger plan (all tiers include 4–32 TB monthly), but it does matter on bandwidth-capped residential setups.
What the Calculator Won't Tell You (Honest Limits)
A static calculator can be highly accurate for vanilla games where the math is well-understood. It cannot perfectly predict:
- Custom modpacks. The modpack dropdown covers the major named packs. If you're running a custom-built modpack, expect ±30% variance from the listed numbers.
- Network conditions. RAM and CPU are the bottleneck for most hosting decisions, but a poorly-routed server with 80ms ping to your players will feel laggy regardless of how much RAM it has. Hostinger's Vilnius/Warsaw/London datacenters are the right choice for European players.
- Future patches. Rust gained 3–4 GB to baseline in a single 2024 patch. ARK ASA's per-map RAM has shifted with each major release. Treat the numbers as a 2026 snapshot and revalidate quarterly.
- Anti-cheat / mod loader compatibility. Some modded environments require specific Java versions or kernel features that may not be available on every plan.
The calculator outputs ranges, not single numbers, specifically because precision here is fake. "12–14 GB recommended" is more honest than "13 GB exactly."
Choosing a Host: Game Panel vs VPS vs Bare Metal
For most self-hosters, Hostinger's Game Panel hosting is the right starting point — it ships with CubeCoders AMP preinstalled, AMD EPYC processors, NVMe SSDs, DDoS protection, and one-click deployment for the games on this list.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | NVMe | Bandwidth | From |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Game Panel 1 (KVM 1) | 1 | 4 GB | 50 GB | 4 TB | €6.99/mo |
| Game Panel 2 (KVM 2) | 2 | 8 GB | 100 GB | 8 TB | €8.99/mo |
| Game Panel 4 (KVM 4) | 4 | 16 GB | 200 GB | 16 TB | €13.99/mo |
| Game Panel 8 (KVM 8) | 8 | 32 GB | 400 GB | 32 TB | €25.99/mo |
The plan tiers map cleanly to the calculator outputs:
- Game Panel 1 (4 GB / 1 vCPU) — vanilla Minecraft for ≤8 friends, Bedrock for ≤30, small Valheim group.
- Game Panel 2 (8 GB / 2 vCPU) — sweet spot for Paper Minecraft 10–25 players, Palworld co-op, vanilla Rust 3000 map.
- Game Panel 4 (16 GB / 4 vCPU) — most modded Minecraft (ATM10, Vault Hunters), single-map ARK ASE with mods, Rust 4500 map, single-map ARK ASA low-mod.
- Game Panel 8 (32 GB / 8 vCPU) — heavy modded Minecraft, ARK ASA with mods, Rust 6000 plugin-heavy, Palworld 32-slot.
When you outgrow Game Panel 8, you're looking at dedicated VPS provisioning or bare metal. The signs you've outgrown shared hosting post covers the broader VPS-vs-managed decision; the same logic applies to game hosting.
Self-managed VPS deployment without the panel saves about 200–500 MB of RAM (no AMP overhead) but requires you to manage systemd, backups, and updates yourself. Worth it if you've done it before. Not worth it if you'd rather spend your weekend playing the game.
Cross-Game Summary at Common Player Counts
| Game / Variant | 4 players | 10 players | 20 players | 50 players | 100 players |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minecraft Vanilla | 3 GB / 1 vCPU | 6 GB / 2 vCPU | 8 GB / 2 vCPU | 12 GB / 4 vCPU | 16+ GB / 4 vCPU |
| Minecraft Paper | 4 GB / 1 vCPU | 6–8 GB / 2 vCPU | 8–10 GB / 2–4 vCPU | 12–16 GB / 4 vCPU | 16–24 GB / 4–8 vCPU |
| Minecraft Modded (avg pack) | 6 GB / 2 vCPU | 10–12 GB / 4 vCPU | 14–16 GB / 4 vCPU | 24+ GB / 4–8 vCPU | Generally not viable past ~30 |
| Bedrock | 2 GB / 1 vCPU | 3 GB / 2 vCPU | 4 GB / 2 vCPU | 6–8 GB / 2 vCPU | 10+ GB / 4 vCPU |
| Valheim (cap = 10 vanilla) | 4 GB / 2 vCPU | 6–8 GB / 2 vCPU | requires mods | requires mods | not viable |
| ARK ASE (single map) | 8 GB / 2 vCPU | 10 GB / 4 vCPU | 14 GB / 4 vCPU | 24+ GB / 4–8 vCPU | Dedicated tier |
| ARK ASA (single map) | 12–16 GB / 4 vCPU | 16 GB / 4 vCPU | 24+ GB / 4–8 vCPU | 32+ GB / 8 vCPU | Dedicated tier |
| Palworld | 8 GB / 4 vCPU | 12 GB / 4 vCPU | 16 GB / 4 vCPU | Not engine-supported | Not engine-supported |
| Rust (4500 map) | 8 GB / 2 vCPU | 10 GB / 2 vCPU | 12 GB / 4 vCPU | 14–16 GB / 4 vCPU | 24 GB / 4–8 vCPU |
Frequently Asked Questions
Final Thoughts
Hosting a game server in 2026 isn't hard once you stop trusting whichever number sounds plausible and start checking against multiple sources. The calculator above is the shortcut: paste in your game, your players, your modpack, and get a sourced range with the right Hostinger plan attached.
If you spot a number that's drifted — Rust adds 2 GB to its baseline overnight, Palworld 1.0 changes the engine — the calculator data file is versioned with a lastVerified timestamp per game profile. Quarterly refreshes are the maintenance commitment that keeps a tool like this honest.
For most players: pick the calculator's recommended plan, schedule weekly backups, and play. The rest is overengineering.
