VPS Hosting for a Valheim Server: 1.4 GB of RAM Measured at Zero Players

CT 161 gamelab already ran my DayZ server. On 2026-10-18 I installed Valheim’s dedicated server in the same LXC container — Debian 12.15, 4 cores of an i7-4790K, 8 GB RAM — using LinuxGSM v26.4.0. The process resident memory peaked at 1,432 MB with zero players. It reached ready in 36 seconds. Server files take 2.04 GB on disk. Its first start shut itself down over a five-character password minimum.

How I measured it

A script on the box, gmeasure.py, runs ./vhserver start, polls every second, and records from inside the container. Ready is the number of seconds from start until the console log prints Game server connected — the line Valheim writes once it has registered with Steam, not the moment the process exists. That distinction is the same gap between alive and ready I ran into when my uptime check said up too early. RSS comes from /proc/<pid>/status for the valheim_server.x86_64 process about every 30 seconds for ten minutes. “Tree” covers all processes under the vhserver user: the server, LinuxGSM’s tmux, and a cat. CPU is read over a 60-second window from the process ticks in /proc/<pid>/stat, because ps in this container reports the process’s elapsed time as 4,123,078,912 seconds and its %cpu is nonsense. Disk is du of serverfiles.

The memory curve

The run started at 16:25:30 with zero players.

  t=   30s pid=12812 rss=1296 MB tree=1301 MB
  ready at 36 s
  t=   60s pid=12812 rss=1397 MB tree=1402 MB
  t=   90s pid=12812 rss=1425 MB tree=1430 MB
  t=  120s pid=12812 rss=1425 MB tree=1430 MB
  t=  180s pid=12812 rss=1427 MB tree=1432 MB
  t=  210s pid=12812 rss=1430 MB tree=1436 MB
  t=  360s pid=12812 rss=1432 MB tree=1437 MB
  t=  571s pid=12812 rss=1432 MB tree=1437 MB
ready=36s  rss_peak=1432 MB  rss_final=1432 MB  tree=1437 MB  cpu_idle=6.7% of one core (60 s window)  disk=2.04 GB

RSS hit 1,425 MB at 90 seconds and moved only 7 MB more in the following eight minutes. Peak equals final: 1,432 MB. At that point free -m inside the container reported 1,390 MB used, 5,024 MB free, and 6,801 MB available. CPU idle settled at 6.7% of one core with nobody connected. One run. I did not repeat it.

The console log backs the ready line: at 16:25:55 it wrote Steam game server initialized and Valheim version: l-1.0.20 (network version 41), then at 16:26:05 Game server connected.

Disk: SteamCMD downloaded 2,186,637,152 bytes for app 896660 and reported Success! App '896660' fully installed. du in MiB makes the installed serverfiles 2.04 GB.

The first start shut itself down

Before the measurement, LinuxGSM’s shipped _default.cfg for Valheim contained this:

13:serverpassword="" # Minimum password length is 5.

The server started and exited. Console log:

10/18/2026 16:24:25:  creating
10/18/2026 16:24:25: Error bad password:The password is too short
Input System module state changed to: Shutdown.

After that there was no valheim_server process; ps -u vhserver | grep -c valheim_server returned 0. Between the password error and the shutdown, nine NullReferenceException: The WorldGenerator instance was null lines appeared in the same second. The fix was to set serverpassword to at least five characters in the instance config, lgsm/config-lgsm/vhserver/vhserver.cfg, not in _default.cfg. I also set public="0" there because the box is LAN only.

What that means for a rented VPS

The measured idle server is a 1,432 MB process that plateaus inside two minutes and sits at a few percent of one core. The size of VPS you need is set by RAM, and it is small. A 2 GB plan is the smallest that holds 1,432 MB with anything left over for the OS and LinuxGSM. Before you rent, check the requirements table against these numbers.

Prices below are list prices copied from each provider’s public pricing page on 2026-10-18, from plans.py 2 reading the same price file as the hosting-cost calculator.

At the time of writing, that’s USD 10.00/month at Vultr, EUR 11.99/month at Hetzner, and USD 12.00/month at DigitalOcean. A rented VPS bills whether the game is running or not.

Player load was not measured. Zero players joined. How much headroom a 2 GB plan leaves under real player load is open. I won’t put a number on it.

Self-hosting as the calculator’s defaults puts a USD 385 Beelink EQ14 with 16 GB at USD 10.69/month over 36 months, plus 18.24 kWh/month at USD 0.18/kWh for USD 3.28/month — USD 13.98/month total. That 16 GB box is not a like-for-like comparison with a 2 GB VPS.

My vanilla DayZ server on this same box measured 4,842 MB resident at zero players on 2026-08-07. The Valheim server is under a third of that.