How to Compare Any Valheim Host

There is no price table on this page, deliberately. Game hosts reprice constantly and any figure quoted here would be wrong within a quarter — and wrong in a way you could check in one click. What does not go stale is what to compare, so that is what this page is.

The five things worth checking

Are backups included, and how many generations?

A Valheim world is a single file, so backups are not a nicety. They are the only thing standing between a corrupted save and starting over. Ask whether they are automatic, how often, how many are kept, and whether you can download them yourself. "Backups available" sometimes means "you can copy the file manually".

How do mods get installed?

Every host will say mods are supported. What differs is the work: whether BepInEx is a toggle or something you install over SSH, whether the plugin folder is in a file browser, and whether it survives a restart. A plugin folder outside the persisted volume is the failure people discover after their first restart.

Is crossplay actually enabled, with its port published?

Crossplay needs UDP 2458 alongside 2456 and 2457. A host can enable the crossplay flag and forget the port, and the result works perfectly for Steam players and fails only for Xbox and Game Pass ones. Worth asking about explicitly, because it is invisible until half your group cannot join.

How many machines hold your world?

On most hosts, one. That is normal and usually fine, but it means the answer to "what happens when that disk fails" is entirely down to their backup regime. Ask where the world lives and what the recovery story is, rather than assuming redundancy that is not advertised.

Per slot, or per resource?

This is where Valheim differs from every other game on a host's price list, and it is the criterion most worth understanding. See below.

Why slot pricing fits Valheim badly

Most game hosts sell tiers by player count, because for most games that number is meaningful. Valheim caps every dedicated server at ten concurrent players — the game enforces it, on any hardware, at any host, for any price. A host selling you a twenty-slot Valheim tier is selling a number that cannot exist.

More usefully: player count is not what strains a Valheim server anyway. Memory use grows with how much has been BUILT and how far the map has been EXPLORED. A duo who have been playing since launch, with sprawling bases and half the map uncovered, will work a server harder than eight people on a world started last week.

So compare on RAM and disk. If a host only publishes slot counts, ask what memory sits behind each tier — and treat reluctance to answer as an answer.

The migration question nobody asks

Ask how you would leave, before you arrive. For Valheim the honest answer should be trivially easy: the world is a.dband a.fwlfile, and a host that gives you file access has given you everything.

Unlike most games there is no database dump, no licence key and no server identity bound to the provider, so there is genuinely nothing to lock you in. A host that makes downloading your own world difficult is telling you something.

How this host answers them

Backups: hourly, zipped, three days retained, downloadable from the panel
Mods: BepInEx as a deploy switch, plugin folder in the file browser, ValheimPlus supported
Crossplay: enabled, with UDP 2456, 2457 and 2458 all published
World location: replicated across the independent nodes your app runs on
Pricing: per resource, at $3.93, $5.31 and $6.91 for 4GB, 6GB and 8GB
Leaving: download the two world files any time; billing is monthly

Compare those against a current quote from anywhere else rather than against a number on a comparison page — including this one.

See the plans

Priced on RAM, CPU and disk rather than on a player number the game will not exceed. First month free if your Flux account is new.

Frequently asked questions

What should I compare when choosing a Valheim host?

Whether backups are included and how many generations they keep, whether mods are supported and how you install them, how many machines your world file lives on, whether crossplay is actually enabled with its port published, and whether pricing is per slot or per resource. Slot price is the least informative number, because Valheim caps every server at ten players regardless of what you pay.

How much should a Valheim server cost?

On Flux, $3.93 a month for 4GB and 2 vCores, $5.31 for 6GB and 2.5 vCores, and $6.91 for 8GB and 4 vCores, billed monthly with backups included in every tier. Compare on the RAM and the disk rather than the slot label, since all three tiers reach the same ten-player ceiling.

Are slot-based Valheim plans worth paying more for?

Rarely, and it is worth understanding why. Valheim hard-caps at ten concurrent players, so a host selling you a tier of that number is charging for something no plan can exceed. What genuinely differs between tiers is the memory behind the world, which is what decides whether a large base stutters.

Can I migrate between Valheim hosts?

Yes, and it is unusually easy. The whole world is two files. Download the .db and .fwl from one host, upload them to the next, match the world name and you are done — there is no database dump, no licence key and no server identity to lose.