ARK: Survival Ascended Hosting

A non-dedicated session, the kind one player hosts from inside their own game, is locked to that player's platform. A PC host cannot take a friend on Xbox Series X|S or PlayStation 5 along: the session simply never appears in their server list. Groups hit this constantly and assume something is misconfigured. Nothing is. That mode does not do crossplay.

A dedicated server does. Steam, Microsoft Store, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 players all connect to the same server, and console players find it through the in-game unofficial server browser. For a mixed-platform tribe, renting a server is not a convenience, it is the only route.

The second thing a dedicated server changes is persistence. The island keeps running when you log off, so tames keep growing and crops keep ripening whether the host is awake or not.

The ARK community wiki publishes measured memory for a fresh world on default settings with nobody connected. The spread across maps is wider than the spread across a full lobby:

Two of those rows are honest guesses and we would rather say so. Studio Wildcard has published no memory figures for the newer maps, and the wiki's rows for them are still blank, so those numbers come from players and hosts running them rather than from measurement we can point at.

Player count moves the total much less than people expect. Each connected player adds roughly 50 to 150 MB, so twenty players add around 2 GB, less than the gap between two maps on the table above. (That measurement is from Survival Evolved. Wildcard has not published an Ascended equivalent.) Some hosts price ARK by player slots. On this game, slots are the smaller variable.

What genuinely grows over time is the world. Structures, tames and storage all accumulate into the save, so a server that felt comfortable in week one often wants more after a few months. Our plans are RAM-based and upgradeable from the panel for exactly that reason: you start at the size your map needs and add memory when the world earns it, without a migration.

One thing that looks like a fault and is not: memory runs high for about ten minutes after every restart, while creatures spawn in and quiet areas fall into stasis. Then it settles. Judge your server's usage after that, not during it.

Current as of the Astraeos 1.0 update. Studio Wildcard shipped the map's Heaven and the Abyss expansion on August 27, 2026: a floating-island region, a deep-sea region built for underwater bases, and warship combat, on a map already spanning more than 264 square kilometers. A heavy map that is still growing is one more reason to size that server generously.

In a CrossARK cluster, every map runs as its own server process with its own memory. A three-map cluster is three servers. Nothing about running them together makes the second and third map cheaper to host, because each one is loading a whole world of its own.

Worth planning for before you commit to a map list. Sizing one map correctly and adding the next when your tribe is ready for it costs less than sizing three badly at the start.

Ascended left the Steam Workshop behind. Mods are distributed through CurseForge using the game's own built-in mod system, and that change has a consequence worth spelling out: because the server delivers the mods rather than each player subscribing to them, console players can run mods for the first time in ARK, as long as the server is running them.

The flow on the server side is short. Find the mod on CurseForge, take its mod ID, add the IDs to your server's mod list in load order, restart. The server pulls them down and connecting players receive them automatically. Nobody subscribes to anything.

Budget roughly 50 to 200 MB of memory per mod, more for creature packs and full overhauls. Every GG Host server includes SFTP access, so the files stay yours to inspect and back up.

An ARK dedicated server defaults to 70 players and the cap is configurable. On Ascended specifically the slot cap is set with the -WinLiveMaxPlayers launch parameter, because the older MaxPlayers setting gets forced back to its default value. Self-hosters lose evenings to that one.

Beyond slots, the usual levers are yours: rates, difficulty, the map the server runs, admin passwords and the full server configuration, with automatic game updates so a Wildcard patch does not leave your server behind.

Servers deploy in minutes across our regions in the United States, Brazil, South Africa, England, Germany, Thailand, Singapore and Australia, on M.2 NVMe storage as standard. Attack traffic is handled by our in-house DDoS mitigation, written on XDP and eBPF, which inspects packets in the network driver before the operating system's network stack sees them. Attacks come in, players keep playing. No extra charge.

• ARK: Survival Ascended Server RAM Requirements by Map