The Forest server hosting built for survival.

Running The Forest in co-op from a home PC sounds cheaper on paper, but it rarely is once you factor in the realities. A self-hosted listen server only stays online while the host is in the game, ties up that person's machine, and exposes their home IP and bandwidth to attack. The moment the host's power, internet or PC has a wobble, your whole group is kicked out — and a residential connection has neither the bandwidth nor the DDoS protection to survive the attacks game servers routinely attract.

Renting a dedicated The Forest server solves all of this. EUGameHost includes always-on DDoS protection free on every plan, a 10 Gbps network, full FTP/SFTP access for deep customisation 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.

The Forest runs a persistent, physics-heavy survival world, and as your base, structures and save file grow, the simulation load grows with it. A strong per-core clock speed, generous memory and fast storage are what hold performance steady — keeping building, combat, exploration and the world's AI smooth even on a long-lived save with a full lobby of players.

The pressure point is a heavily-built, long-running world at peak. When eight players are exploring, fighting and constructing across a large base all at once, a low-clock or oversold CPU sees its performance collapse — producing the lag, stutter and desync that ruin a survival session. High-clock CPUs, fast DDR4 memory and NVMe storage keep that from happening.

CPU and memory

EUGameHost runs The Forest on high-clock, company-owned processors with generous DDR4 memory, sized so your world isn't fighting noisy neighbours for cycles at peak time. Our plans step up from 16 GB through 24 GB to 32 GB of RAM with increasing CPU headroom, so you can match the plan to how heavily-built and long-running your world is.

Storage and network: NVMe and 10 Gbps

Survival saves grow large over time, so NVMe SSDs slash the time it takes to load your world, write saves and stream the map to joining players. Every plan rides a 10 Gbps network so bandwidth is never the bottleneck for friends connecting to your world.

Game servers are frequent DDoS targets, and generic web DDoS protection is largely ineffective against game-layer attacks, which is why proper mitigation has to understand game traffic specifically.

EUGameHost includes always-on DDoS protection on every The Forest server, with Layer 3 and 4 volumetric mitigation, Layer 7 application filtering and up to 6Tbps of capacity 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 group offline the moment they're targeted.

The Forest server hosting is priced mainly on the hardware headroom you need — more RAM and CPU for heavily-built, long-running or mod-heavy worlds. A small co-op group costs very little to run, while a large, persistent world wants more memory and CPU, and the pricing reflects that.

EUGameHost's The Forest plans start from £4.80 per month, stepping up to £9.60 and £12.80 per month for more RAM and CPU headroom, each sized to run a full 8-player lobby. 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 session and adjust it afterwards without penalty.

Location is the difference between responsive co-op and a world that feels laggy for half your group. The Forest is sensitive to latency — building, combat and close interactions all come down to fractions of a second — so you want your server hosted as close as possible to the bulk of your players to keep ping low and synchronisation tight.

EUGameHost offers The Forest 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 groups, 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.