We now host ARK: Survival Evolved!
ARK: Survival Evolved servers are live. Five plans, from 8GB at A$30.00 a month up to 16GB at A$60.00, running on our own hardware in Australia. Every official map is on every server, and you pick the one you want in your control panel.
Plans: mchosts.com.au/plans/ark-survival-evolved
The plans
ARK starts bigger than most games. The server loads a whole map before anyone joins, so the smallest plan is 8GB, and the plans go up two gigabytes at a time to 16GB. The bigger maps want the bigger plans, and the Config tab tells you which. When you need more, you can upgrade and your world comes with you.
Every plan is A$3.75 per GB, the same rate as every other game we host. These are the ongoing prices, not an introductory rate.
Your first month is 20% off on monthly billing, applied automatically at checkout. Or pay up front and take 10% off three months, 15% off six or 20% off a year. Those prices are rounded down to a whole dollar, so you always save at least that much. The two offers don't stack.
Plans up to 10GB come with 30GB of storage, and plans from 12GB come with 40GB, because the game itself takes about 23GB of it. If a long running world needs more, open a support ticket and we'll expand it at no extra cost.
What is different about an ARK server
You pick the map. The Island, The Center, Ragnarok, Valguero, Crystal Isles, Lost Island and Fjordur need nothing extra. Scorched Earth, Aberration, Extinction, the two Genesis parts and Aquatica need your players to own the DLC. Each map keeps its own save, so you can try another one and come back. ARK Server Settings has the list and which plan each needs.
Your first start takes a while. The server downloads the whole game from Steam, about 23GB, before it runs for the first time. Give it twenty minutes or more. After that a start takes a minute or two.
The console works. Type ARK's admin commands on the Console tab and the reply comes back. listplayers, broadcast, saveworld, destroywilddinos and the rest all work from there, and kick and ban take a player's name.
It restarts once a day. At 4am Brisbane time, your server restarts and takes any new version of ARK. The game turns away a player whose version doesn't match the server, and Steam updates players without asking, so a server left behind is one nobody can join. You can move the time or turn it off on the Settings tab.
Rates and difficulty are on the Config tab. Experience, taming, harvest, PvE or PvP and the difficulty, with no file to edit. Everything else ARK can be told is in its own two files on the Files tab.
Joining takes a port. Players add your address with the query port to Steam's favourites, or type open and your address with the game port in the game's console. Connecting to Your ARK Server walks through both.
Steam Workshop mods, from the Mods tab. Search the Workshop or paste a link, and your server downloads the mod itself the next time it starts. Put them in the order you want them to load. Map mods and total conversions are coming later.
What is the same
Everything else. The control panel, the file manager, SFTP, backups and support work the way they do for a Minecraft server, because it's the same panel and the same team. So does the 7-day money-back guarantee.
Eight games now
Minecraft is still what most of our customers run, and nothing about those plans has changed. ARK makes eight games on the same hardware, the same panel and the same support. Come and see the lot at mchosts.com.au/games.
