Picking your ARK: Survival Ascended server plan on Hostd

Pick the right ARK: Survival Ascended server plan with RAM and slot guidance. Standard, Pro, or Elite, sized for real tribe load on Hostd.

Picking your ARK: Survival Ascended server plan is really a question of how much your tribe (or your community) will throw at the world. ARK ASA is the heaviest game we host, full stop, and the right tier is the one that gives the engine room to breathe.

We sell three monthly tiers for ARK: SA. All of them include the in-panel CurseForge mod browser, the map selector, restart warnings, and the maintenance toolkit. Pro and Elite get the short yourname.hostd.it domain; Standard gets yourname.hostdservers.com. The main thing that changes between tiers is headroom.

#The three ARK: SA tiers

#Standard: 12 GB RAM, £24.99/month

Built for a small tribe or a friend group. Vanilla or a light mod stack on a single map. 30 slots is plenty for a private server where you actually know everyone connecting. 12 GB is the genuine floor for ARK: SA; we won't sell anything smaller because below that, the server will OOM during world load, and you'll be opening a ticket on day one.

#Pro: 16 GB RAM, £32.99/month

This is the mid-community tier. 45 slots covers an active Discord with regulars, alliance tribes, and the occasional event night without you queueing people at the door. 16 GB gives a full mod stack (Awesome SpyGlass, Structures Plus, an Eco mod or two, Super Structures) room alongside the map, dinos, and the structures everyone keeps building.

#Elite: 20 GB RAM, £39.99/month

For large public servers, event servers, and anything aiming at sustained high player counts on a heavy mod stack. 60 slots, 20 GB, and the full kernel-enforced memory cgroup behind it. If you're running a public PvP cluster map or a popular RP server, this is where you live.

#Dedicated RAM, not burstable

Every GB on your plan is reserved at the kernel level. No shared burst pool, no swap spill. That matters during ARK: SA's worst moments: a raid pushing entity counts, a tribe-event spawn wave, or the autosave landing while 40 people are loading chunks at once.

#About the floor

ARK: SA holds every entity, every structure, and every dino in memory at once. That is genuinely how the engine works. 12 GB is the smallest plan we offer because anything less is not going to cut it. If you're unsure, go one tier up rather than one tier down; you'll thank yourself the first time someone builds a 4,000-piece base.

#hostd.it on Pro and Elite

Pro (16 GB) and Elite (20 GB) get a free yourname.hostd.it domain; Standard (12 GB) gets yourname.hostdservers.com. Either is free with the plan. Players favourite the short name instead of memorising an IP, and you can change nodes later without anyone needing a new address.

#First boot takes about 15 minutes

ARK: SA boots through SteamCMD, then through Proton, then loads the world and any mods you've selected. That start-up cost is roughly 15 minutes the first time. The dashboard shows Provisioning until the server is actually game-ready, not just process-running. Subsequent restarts are much quicker.

#Where to go next

• Connecting to your ARK: Survival Ascended server for the in-game join flow and favourites.
• ARK: SA maps and CurseForge mods on Hostd for the map selector and the mod browser.
• Your first server if you haven't ordered yet.

Written and maintained by the Hostd engineering team. Last updated 2026-05-20. Notice a mistake? Tell us.