The best Rust hosting tested by experts

The best rust hosting makes setting up a server easier than playing Rust! The Multiplayer survival game isn’t for the faint hearted given its reputation for being difficult and demanding. However, if you’re keen to host your own Rust server, that doesn’t have to be as hard as the game. The best game server hosting overall will help you along the way but there are some game server providers which are a little better than the rest at providing the ultimate Rust experience.

Of course, if you’re new to Rust, the best thing to do is throw yourself into some established servers to figure things out for yourself. Once you’ve dealt with that baptism of fire, come back and take a look at the best Rust hosting available right now. Each of the server providers below are perfect for getting some teammates and friends together, all while giving you ultimate control over what you can do.

We’ve spent plenty of time researching and trying out Rust server hosting. Appreciating that you’re looking for the same sort of things as us — good performance, stability, and a great price — we’ve picked out the best Rust server hosting around. Many will also work very well as general game servers but we’ve got a keen eye on all things Rust here. We’ve included extra newbie friendly options, budget choices, and more premium hosts too.

Best Rust hosting of 2024 in full

Best Rust host overall

Whichever you choose, you get the typical Scalacube experience which means an easy to use control panel for setup. Plugins can be installed via the file manager section which is fairly well laid out with Scalacube also providing advice each step of the way. As a nice touch, if you simply want to practice the game (we don’t blame you), you can create a private game instance with one click before customizing a bunch of features like world size, loot tables, difficulty levels, and other key settings.

It’s simply done with things laid out in an attractive way so even if you’re new to game server hosting, you can figure things out. Because of how Scalacube is laid out, you won’t find yourself low on resources for plugins as it’s solely focused on player slots. Instead, the biggest decision comes from going vanilla or using a modded Oxide server. Note — once you choose a plan, you can’t swap to other games which is a minor flaw but less of an issue for the Rust devotees.

Ultimately, Scalacube offers a straightforward experience which can be as advanced as you need it to be. Novices can get things set up easily enough but the control panel and full FTP access means you’ll never lack control for those times when you want to go more advanced.

Best value Rust host

A consistently good option whatever your server plans, Shockbyte is simple to use and fantastic value. At first glance, it only offers three Rust plans but the beauty here is that you can also customize plans adjusting a slider to the number of player slots you need. That means there’s no need to pay for more than you need so it’s perfect for someone with a Rust server and ambitious plans that may need changing over time. The basic plan offers 40 player slots as standard with up to 300 players possible. All the plans support Oxide, Carbon, and Harmony, so they’re perfect for avid modders and anyone keen to make their server special.

As standard, each plan also has instant setup, auto-wipe support, custom maps, staging branch, automatic backup, DDoS protection and 100% uptime. There’s also 24/7 support although we did find that some tickets took a little longer to reply than others. Support is otherwise strong though and Shockbyte has some comprehensive tutorials and guides to cut down your need to talk to anyone.

Ultimately, the great thing about Shockbyte is how hassle-free it is. It gets to the point and simply works well. It even offers a free FTP file migration service for anyone switching from a different Rust server host. Impressively, even the most high-end of Rust hosting packages still works out as strong value for money making Shockbyte a consistently appealing option financially.

Its user interface is also simple to figure out. Picking out what you want is a matter of making a few basic selections with Shockbyte fairly good at explaining what everything means even if you’re a novice to the game server hosting world. It’s hard to find fault with other than the occasional slow support and an interface that’s heavy on the gamer aesthetic side of things.

Best for experienced users

Hostinger is a fairly easy recommendation to make for pretty much anything hosting-related from website hosting to gaming. It could be more beginner-friendly if it didn’t use VPS terminology. Stick with it and you get exceptional value and a control panel that makes a lot of logical sense. Four different plans are available, with the cheapest one packing 4GB of RAM, 50GB of NVMe storage, and 1 vCPU, before latter plans ramp things up to a more impressive 32GB of RAM and 8 vCPUs, as well as 400GB of storage. Crucially, the use of NVMe storage means that Hostinger is consistently speedy. That certainly felt the case in our tests and will make a difference on reasonably demanding titles like Rust.

All of Hostinger’s plans include mod support, complete control, DDoS protection, and automatic off-site backups. Once set up, pick a Rust instance and Hostinger takes just a couple of minutes to install the server. The file manager makes it easy enough to install plugins and mods, but you can also use FTP access if you prefer. Even for beginners, the latter can make more sense.

Alongside that is an extensive array of options to tweak. The basics are there like enabling an anticheat mode, or switching on automatic updates. You can also add a level URL, set how many players can participate, and add branding. The important part here is that Hostinger labels things clearly so providing you have a basic knowledge of the game, you’ll know what each option does.

At all times, you can quickly dip into the console to see what’s going on, as well as check the status section of the site. There, you’ll find information on CPU and memory usage as well as how many players are currently playing. That’s not new information, as pretty much all game server hosts do this via a web-based interface, but Hostinger does so in a much clearer manner than most. It strips back any gamer aesthetic and focuses on the facts you need.

Best premium Rust host

BisectHosting offers a lot of different plans so it’s well known for its inexpensive options for other games. It’s not badly priced on the budget end of the scale for Rust either but we’re more interested in its premium plans. Focusing on RAM, it’s possible to buy a plan with up to 48GB which should provide you with everything you need and more. In reality, even BisectHosting reckons you don’t need to go completely high-end to reap the best benefits from Rust but if you plan on installing dozens of mods, there’s peace of mind here.

All the BisectHosting servers promise instant setup and that rang true in our time with it. Within moments, we were all set with our Rust server. The control panel is a predictably dark moody gamer one but it’s clear to find what you need to do. Dive into startup and you can adjust all the details possible from the server name to what map to use and if there’s a custom map URL. It’s easy enough to figure out what you’re doing with the same being the case when diving into the files and database section. You can also create multiple instances so it’s simple enough to swap between different Rust servers which can be useful for a particular game night you may have planned which differs from the usual format.