Valheim Hosting Providers Compared

Plenty of good hosts offer Valheim. This page groups them by the pricing model they use, explains why that model matters more for Valheim than for almost any other game, and gives you the questions to put to whichever one you are looking at — including this one.

A note on what this page will not do

No price table for other providers, and no claims about their uptime, support or hardware. Game hosts reprice and run promotions constantly, so any figure here would be wrong within a quarter and you could catch it in one click — which would cost more trust than the comparison could earn. What each provider offers is theirs to state and yours to verify against a live quote.

Who hosts Valheim

We have separate pages on two of the biggest by name — G-Portal and ZAP-Hosting — framed the same way.

Why the pricing model matters so much here

Valheim caps every dedicated server at ten concurrent players. The game enforces it, on any hardware, at any host, at any price. So a provider selling tiered slot counts for Valheim is pricing a number that cannot go above ten — and above that, the tiers are selling you something the game will not deliver.

The number that actually decides whether a Valheim server holds up is memory, and Valheim’s memory use grows with how much has been BUILT and how far the map has been EXPLORED — not with how many people are online. Two players on a world running since launch can work a server harder than eight on a world started last week.

Which gives you the single most useful comparison rule for this game: compare the RAM, not the slot count. If a host publishes only slot tiers, ask what memory sits behind each one.

Six questions to ask any Valheim host

Put these to whichever provider you are considering. Our answers are in the second column; we are not filling in anyone else’s.

The crossplay port is worth asking about specifically

Valheim crossplay needs UDP 2458 alongside the usual 2456 and 2457. A host can switch crossplay on and not publish that port, and the result is the most misleading failure in Valheim hosting: Steam players connect normally and only Xbox and Game Pass players fail, which looks like a problem with their game rather than the server.

It is a real gap rather than a hypothetical one — the Flux marketplace entry for Valheim enables crossplay while publishing only the first two ports, which is why this site adds the third itself at deploy. Ask any host you are comparing whether all three are open. More on crossplay here.

Switching between providers is unusually cheap

This is the part that should make the decision low-stakes. A Valheim world is two files — a.dband a.fwl— and moving hosts is downloading them from one and uploading them to the next.

No database dump, no licence key, no server identity bound to a provider. Any host that gives you file access has given you everything you need to leave, and a host that makes downloading your own world difficult is telling you something worth hearing.

Frequently asked questions