Sons of the Forest hosting that can’t wipe your world.

From $27.50/mo for 10 GB of guaranteed dedicated RAM, $32 for 12 GB, $41 for 16 GB or $59 for 24 GB. No setup fee and no slot pricing — which matters here, because Sons of the Forest caps a server at 8 players itself. A host billing you per slot is billing you for a limit the developer already set.

We measured our own, off the kernel rather than a padded dashboard figure. A fresh Normal world with nobody connected holds 6.5 GB, and one player for half an hour moved it to 6.61 GB — this game spends its memory on the world, not on people. So the floor is not set by players at all. What sets it is the mod loader: with RedLoader and all 16 server-capable mods loaded, 7.08 GB, and a cold modded boot peaks near 7.9 GB while it builds its interop cache. That is 96% of an 8 GB box, which is not a floor, it is a coin toss — so we sell 10 GB, where the same boot sits at 69% with zero memory-pressure events. BisectHosting arrives at the same 10 GB from the other direction.

No — and this one catches almost everybody, so it is worth knowing before you buy. Sons of the Forest only saves a player once that player has somewhere to sleep. Build a tent, sleep in it, and from then on your character, your inventory and your progress survive a rejoin and a full server restart. Until you have built one there is nothing for the game to write, so you get the intro again and an empty pack, and it looks exactly like a broken server. That is the game’s own design, not your host — we tested it on our own server to be sure. The world itself saves regardless: everything you built, looted and cut down is written on every autosave and every clean shutdown, whether anyone has a tent or not.

Yes — all 35 of them, each a labeled field with the game’s own default beside it, checked against the list the server itself prints on every boot. Difficulty and the whole Custom block, structure damage, tree regrowth, enemy spawns, the save interval, the join password, your server name. Nothing to find and no launch flag to type — and the file is still there if you would rather edit it. And they live on your volume, so a restart, a resize or a game switch cannot reset them.

Yes — RedLoader installs in one click, and this is the part other hosts get wrong, so read it before you pay. Most Sons of the Forest mods run on the player’s PC, not on the server. Of the 167 mods published on sotf-mods.com we read every manifest: 16 declare that they run on a dedicated server. The rest are client mods, and RedLoader deliberately refuses them rather than loading camera and HUD code into a server that has neither. So: upload a server-side mod through the file manager and it runs; hand your friends the page link for anything client-side and everyone installs it on their own copy. And your panel names every mod the server refused, by name, off the loader’s own log — because an upload that silently does nothing is the normal case on this game, and "nothing happened" with no explanation is how you end up opening a ticket.

On most hosts it takes several minutes and can run the box out of memory; on ours it does not happen at all. RedLoader has to translate the game’s code into something mods can attach to, which is a heavy one-off job — we measured it at 12.6 GB and about 76 seconds on a stock setup, which is exactly why other hosts tell you to buy 10 GB before you install a single mod. We do that job when we build the server image instead, the same way we pre-build the Windows compatibility layer, so the work is already done and cached before your server exists. Your first modded boot is a normal boot. It also means your server never has to reach the internet to fetch it, which is the other way that step fails.

Yes — names, not just a number. Sons of the Forest prints the player’s Steam name and Steam ID on one line when they join and again when they leave, so the panel shows you who is on and keeps a join-and-leave history you can scroll back through. It is kept outside the container, so a restart or a rebuild cannot erase it.

Add the Steam ID to the Owners list in your panel and restart. Owners get the in-game admin panel under Esc → Players — kick, ban, and the rest of the host controls — which is where Sons of the Forest puts them. We tested this end to end on our own server rather than reading it off a wiki: the owners file is read when the server starts, so the restart is the part people miss.

You get the live console to read, but not to type into, and the honest reason is the game: Sons of the Forest has no RCON and no remote admin channel at all. Its host controls live in-game behind the Owners list above. We would rather tell you that than put a text box on screen that quietly does nothing. What you do get: the live log, power controls, every setting as a field, the file manager, backups, the player list and the history. ⭐ One thing we did fix — this game writes roughly 3,500 lines of engine noise per boot, which buries anything you actually want to read. We filter it down to the hundred or so lines that mean something, so your console reads like a log instead of a wall.

Yes to both, with one thing worth knowing first: difficulty and the whole Custom block are stamped into a world when it is created and ignored afterwards. That is the game’s design, not a panel limitation — set them how you want them before you start, because changing them later will not move an existing world. Two settings are the exception and apply on every load: tree regrowth and structure damage. Want a different difficulty? Start a new world in a new slot — your old one stays exactly where it is, not overwritten.

Not here, and we built it that way on purpose. Sons of the Forest has a setting whose New value silently re-creates the world on every single restart — Endnight document it themselves, and on a plain server a stray edit to that one line quietly deletes everything you have built, one restart at a time. On our servers the platform forces the safe value on the command line every boot, where a file edit cannot reach it, and writes it back into the file too. The same applies to your ports. We test this the way it deserves: a harness hand-edits the file to the dangerous value and proves the server still comes up on your existing world.

Yes — nightly, automatically, off-site on a separate network, plus your own named copies we never overwrite and one kept from before every game update. Restore or download any of them yourself from the panel, no ticket. And we save before we stop: we watched a panel restart write the save and confirm it in the log before the process exited, so a restart is not a gamble. The game keeps its own three rolling backups per world beside your save as well, so there is a belt and braces here.

Yes — upload your save through the panel file manager and it loads on the next start. It works the other way too: your world is yours to download whenever you like, including on your way out.

Yes, and your Sons of the Forest world stays put. Switching moves your plan’s RAM to a different game; switch back and the world is waiting. No second bill, no reinstall and no extra charge — the plan is a pool of RAM, not a slot in a box.

NA East (Montreal) — AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, NVMe storage, DDoS-protected network, direct game and query ports with no proxy hops.