ARK: Survival Ascended hosting built for survival.

A big part of ARK: Survival Ascended is choosing your maps and the mods that shape your world. Every official map is supported, and CurseForge gives you access to a huge library of community mods — from quality-of-life tweaks to creature packs and complete map overhauls.

EUGameHost lets you install ASA mods from CurseForge in one click and manage load order and configs from the panel, so you're never wrestling with manual installs. When your community grows beyond one map, our cluster-ready hosting links several servers together for seamless cross-map character, dino and item transfers.

Official maps

ARK: Survival Ascended supports the full roster of official maps — The Island, Scorched Earth, The Center, Aberration, Extinction and Ragnarok — each with its own biomes, creatures and challenges. You can switch maps from the panel and run several together as a cluster.

CurseForge mods

ASA mods are distributed through CurseForge, covering everything from inventory and stack mods to total conversions. With one-click installs and full config access on EUGameHost, you can trial mods, manage load order and keep whichever fit your community best.

Clusters

A cluster links multiple ASA maps so players can transfer their character, tames and items between them. Our hosting is cluster-ready, and our support team can help you set the cluster ID and transfer rules so cross-map travel just works.

Self-hosting ARK from a home PC sounds cheaper on paper, but it rarely is once you factor in the realities. ASA is a demanding, CPU-bound Unreal Engine 5 server, and running it locally ties up your own machine, exposes your home IP and bandwidth to attack, and takes your server offline whenever your power, internet or PC has a wobble. A residential connection has neither the bandwidth nor the DDoS protection to survive the attacks ARK servers routinely attract.

Renting a dedicated ARK server solves all of this. EUGameHost includes always-on Cosmic Guard DDoS protection on every plan, a 10 Gbps network, full FTP/SFTP access for deep customisation, a free MySQL database and 24/7 support for when something needs a human. You also get automatic backups and a browser-based control panel and console — and with no contracts, you can cancel anytime, so renting carries none of the long-term risk of buying and maintaining your own hardware.

ARK: Survival Ascended is one of the most demanding game servers around, and the reason is its Unreal Engine 5 foundation. Server FPS — how smoothly movement, taming, building and combat feel to every connected player — depends heavily on single-core clock speed, generous memory and fast storage, especially once mods and a large dino population are involved.

The pressure point is peak time on a modded server. When a full server runs heavy mods, large bases, big tribes and a high dino count all at once, the simulation load spikes and a low-clock or oversold CPU sees its server FPS collapse — producing the desync, rubber-banding and stutter that drive players away. A strong CPU, fast memory and quick NVMe storage are what hold performance steady when it matters most.

CPU: clock speed wins

Because ASA leans hard on CPU performance, clock speed and per-core throughput are the single biggest factor. EUGameHost runs high-clock Intel and AMD processors (4GHz+) with dedicated CPU cores, so your server isn't fighting noisy neighbours for cycles at peak time.

Memory and storage: DDR + NVMe

ASA's memory footprint grows with player count, mod count and dino population, so generous DDR4/DDR5 memory keeps the world responsive. On storage, Gen 4 NVMe SSDs slash the time it takes to load maps, stream assets to joining players and cache mods. Every plan rides a 10 Gbps network so bandwidth is never the bottleneck for mod and map downloads.

ARK servers are frequent DDoS targets, especially around community launches, events or competitive disputes between servers. Generic web DDoS protection is largely ineffective against game-layer attacks, which is why proper ARK mitigation has to understand game traffic and UDP floods specifically.

EUGameHost includes always-on Cosmic Guard DDoS protection on every ARK server, with up to 6Tbps of mitigation capacity, Layer 3 and 4 volumetric filtering, Layer 7 application filtering and Anycast routing that absorbs large-scale attacks across multiple points of presence. Crucially, protection is always on and your server is never null-routed during an attack — the failure mode of cheap hosts that quietly take your whole community offline the moment they're targeted.

ARK server hosting is priced mainly on two things: the player capacity you need and the resources your map and mods demand. A small tribe costs very little to run, while a busy, heavily modded cluster needs more horsepower — and the pricing reflects that.

EUGameHost's ARK plans start from £7.60 per month, with plans sized for roughly 20, 40 and up to 250 players. Billing is flexible: pay monthly, or commit further and save — quarterly saves 10%, semi-annual saves 20% and annual saves 25%. There are no contracts and you can cancel anytime, so you're free to scale your plan up before a big launch and adjust it afterwards without penalty.

Location is the difference between responsive survival and a server that feels laggy for half your players. ARK is sensitive to latency — taming, building, raiding and PvP all come down to fractions of a second — so you want your server hosted as close as possible to the bulk of your player base to keep ping low.

EUGameHost offers ARK locations in the United Kingdom (London) and the United States (Dallas), with routing optimised for European and North American players. London is the natural home for UK and European communities, while Dallas serves North America with low latency. Run the live latency test at the top of this page to check your real ping to each before you buy, and where your community spans continents, consider a separate server per region so nobody is stuck at a high-ping disadvantage.