Hosting Rust for a Few Friends Without Becoming the Admin

A small group of friends, even just two of you, doesn’t need a game panel, a wipe calendar reminder, or one person who quietly becomes the unpaid admin. It needs an address that doesn’t change, a world that’s still there whenever the group comes back, nobody having to press Start before anyone can play, and a bill that has a ceiling. Here’s what to actually ask any Rust host before you commit, and how Arcadyo answers each one — including the parts we haven’t finished deciding.

What your group actually needs

Strip away the marketing pages and a small friend group’s real list is short:

• An address that never changes. So the server you bookmarked in your Steam favourites, or the connect line pinned in your Discord, still works next month.
• A world that survives absences. Groups play in bursts — hard for a few weeks after a wipe, then quiet, then back again. The world needs to still be there when you are, even after a long gap.
• Nobody has to press Start. If joining requires one specific person to be online first, that person has quietly become the admin, whether they signed up for it or not.
• A predictable monthly maximum. Whoever’s paying should know the worst case in advance, not find out at the end of the month.

Questions worth asking any host before you sign up

1. Wipes. Is it automatic, and on what schedule? Does your build survive between wipes, or only within one? Several hosts advertise this loudly — one even prints the next forced-wipe date on the plan page — because it’s a real, recurring event for every Rust server, not an edge case.
2. Mods. Is Oxide or Carbon supported? Can you install and manage plugins yourself, or does every change go through a support ticket? One-click mod support is common enough in this market that its absence is worth noticing.
3. Backups. How many are kept, and how far back can you actually restore? “We take backups” without a number attached tells you nothing.
4. Location and ping. Is there a datacentre near France, and does the host’s page even say where the server runs? It’s a smaller detail than it should be — several Rust hosts market a French-language page while hosting only in the UK, US or Germany.
5. What happens when nobody’s playing. Do you keep paying a full monthly rate for an empty server, or does the price actually reflect that nobody’s on? This is the question a RAM-plan host would rather you not ask.

How Arcadyo answers each one

• Address: fixed. It doesn’t change when the server sleeps or wakes — the same address works every time, exactly like a server that never sleeps.
• World survives absences: yes. Sleeping preserves the world exactly as it was saved; we’ve tested it coming back unchanged after a full night asleep, and we keep extending how long we test for.
• Nobody presses Start: connecting is what wakes it. Anyone in your group, any time, whether or not the person who pays is even online.
• Predictable maximum: a small base fee, metered hours on top, and a fixed monthly cap that’s the most you’ll ever pay in a given month — never a surprise at the end of it.
• Mods: [not decided yet — whether Oxide/Carbon is supported, and how, will be published here once it’s settled.]
• Wipe policy: [not decided yet — schedule and what survives a wipe will be published here once it’s settled.]
• Backups: [retention count not decided yet — every sleep saves the world first, at minimum.]
• Location: [not finalised yet — France-first is the goal; the exact datacentre will be named once a provider is signed.]

The honest gap

We can answer the first four questions on this list with confidence today, because they follow directly from how the server sleeps and wakes. The other four — mods, wipes, backups, location — are real product decisions that simply haven’t been made yet, and we’d rather leave them as an open bracket on this page than guess at an answer now and change it on you later. If one of those is the one that decides things for your group, ask us directly; it helps us decide faster.