Rust Server Hosting

Two things decide how much memory your server eats: the size of the map and the number of people on it. A small map for a group of friends sits comfortably at the low end. A 4,000 map with a full population, or anything running a long plugin list, wants the 12 GB Facepunch recommends and often more. Large maps with 100 or more players online are where the top of the slider earns its keep.

Our advice is the same one we put on the order page: start at 12 GB. If your server fills up or you add plugins, raise it from your client area. If you are running a small vanilla server for a handful of people, 8 GB is the floor and it will do. We measured a full week on our own Rust servers to back that up: how much RAM your Rust server needs, by map size and population.

Player slots are not something you pay for. Every Rust server comes with 50 slots as the starting point, you can set it higher yourself, and the RAM is the bill.

See Rust server plans

Facepunch ships the monthly Rust update on the first Thursday of every month, and it forces a map wipe on every server in the game. The update changes the network protocol, so a server that has not updated cannot be joined, and the old map save does not carry over. There is no opting out; every Rust host lives by the same Thursday.

On a GG Host server you deal with it two ways. The Wipe Server button in your control panel wipes the map only, or the map and everyone's blueprints, and can hand the server a fresh seed at the same time. Or you schedule the Wipe Day task once: it checks the date, does nothing on ordinary days, and on the first Thursday of the month it stops the server, wipes with the options you chose, and starts it again. Run the Steam update from the panel, or schedule that too, and your server is back on the new build the same evening.

Between force wipes you set your own rhythm. Weekly and fortnightly wipe servers use the same button with a different schedule, and a list of your own seeds lets each wipe land on a map you have already approved.

One thing our wipe deliberately leaves alone is the file Rust uses to identify your server to the Rust+ companion app. Our map and blueprint wipes do not touch it, so a map wipe leaves your players' phones paired; a blueprint wipe clears player data including pairing tokens, so players pair again after one. The full wipe-day guide walks through every option and the dates.

Most modded Rust runs on Oxide, distributed through uMod. On a GG Host server you install it from the Mod Manager in your control panel with one click, and the Install uMod plugins page lets you browse the uMod library of over 1,500 plugins and install any of them with one more click, no FTP needed. You can still drop plugin files into the oxide plugins folder through the file manager or FTP if you prefer.

Oxide needs a matching build after every monthly Rust update, which is the part that catches people out on wipe day. Our panel re-applies the current Oxide build automatically after each Steam update on a server that has it installed, so a modded server does not come back up vanilla by surprise. If you run the staging branch to test next month's update early, the staging build of Oxide is fetched instead.

Carbon, the newer framework that loads Oxide plugins unchanged, is not in the mod manager. It installs the same way any set of files does, through the file manager or FTP, and it updates itself. Installing Oxide and plugins, step by step.

Self-hosting Rust means a machine with a spare 12 GB, a public IP, port forwarding, and someone awake on the first Thursday of the month. Renting means the Thursday is a scheduled task. What a Rust dedicated server actually needs.