How to Host a Conan Exiles Dedicated Server in 2026

If you've been thinking about running your own Conan Exiles server, the moment you start digging into it you realise there's more to think about than just "rent a box, click install". Hardware, mods, the Purge, raid windows, decay timers – Conan asks more of an admin than most survival games of its age, and the answers depend a lot on what kind of community you're trying to build.

This guide is the version I wish someone had handed me the first time I ran a Conan server. It covers the honest version of self-hosting vs managed, the hardware reality in 2026 (not the marketing one), how mods and the Purge actually behave on a long-running server, and how to set one up properly on LOW.MS if that's the route you end up taking.

One thing to flag up front: Funcom shipped the Conan Exiles Enhanced (UE5) update on May 5 2026, which changes a few things this guide used to lean on – most notably, the Exiled Lands and the Isle of Siptah are now a single merged map rather than two separate server types, and UE5 servers run noticeably hungrier on RAM than the old UE4 builds. If you're picking up a Conan server fresh today, you're getting Enhanced by default. If you'd rather stay on the older build for stability or mod-stack reasons, the Enhanced update guide covers how to pin to the Conan Exiles Legacy beta branch.

Why run a dedicated server at all

Official Funcom servers are free, and for some people they're genuinely fine. If you just want to drop in for an hour, kill some exiles, and log back off, they do the job. The moment you want any control over the experience, though, they fall apart fast.

On an official server you don't set the harvest rates, you don't set the XP curve, you don't get to say whether this is a hardcore PvP world or a chilled-out building playground, and you definitely don't get mods. You share the world with whoever happens to be online, including the guy who's decided today is the day he's going to grief everyone within walking distance of spawn. There are no admin tools to deal with him. You just log off.

A dedicated server flips all of that. You write the rules, you pick the map, you choose the mods, you decide who's allowed in, and you keep the world persistent so people can log in on their own schedule and pick up where they left off. For any group bigger than "me and one friend for a weekend," it's the only sensible option.

The three ways to run one

Self-hosting on your own box

Funcom ships the dedicated server for free on Steam (app ID 443030) and you can absolutely run it on a spare machine at home. I've done it. It works. It is also, in my experience, the option that people enjoy for about three weeks before they start quietly resenting it.

The reason is that Conan isn't a cheap game to host, and Enhanced has bumped the floor higher. Where a UE4 Conan server was reasonably comfortable on around 8 GB of RAM and a quad-core with decent single-thread performance, the UE5 Enhanced build runs meaningfully hungrier – early launch-week reads suggest something like 2x to 4x the memory footprint of UE4 for the same population and build density. The old "2 cores and 6 GB" minimums you'll see quoted online date from the UE4 era and are not honest numbers for an Enhanced server in 2026. Plan for more, especially if you want headroom for mods. Conan loves memory, and the SQLite database grows along with every wall, every crafting station, every thrall. A server that felt snappy in week one will feel sluggish in week six if you undersized it.

Then you've got the everything-else list: port forwarding, Windows updates rebooting your box at 3am, your upload bandwidth becoming the server's upload bandwidth, your home IP being handed out to everyone on the server, mod updates every time Funcom or a mod author ships a patch, and backups you have to remember to take yourself. None of it is hard. All of it adds up.

Self-hosting is genuinely a good fit if you're already running a homelab and enjoy that kind of work. For everyone else, the maths stops adding up pretty quickly once you factor in electricity.

Renting a VPS and doing it yourself

The middle option is a generic VPS from a cloud provider and a manual SteamCMD install. You get a real datacentre network and proper uptime, which fixes the worst of the self-hosting pain. What you don't get is any game-specific tooling – it's just a bare box. Every update is an SSH session or RDP. Every config tweak is a text editor. Every time Conan ships a patch you're the one running the install command.

If you enjoy sysadmin work, this is fine. If you just want to play Conan with your clan, it's a lot of yak shaving for very little benefit over a managed host.

Managed hosting

This is what we do at LOW.MS, so take the bias as read. The pitch is simple: you pick a region at checkout, the server provisions on shared bare-metal hardware within a couple of minutes, and the panel already knows what Conan Exiles is and how to look after it. Updates are a click. Backups happen automatically and live in cloud storage. DDoS protection sits in front of the network before you've even logged in. Support is staffed 24/7 by people who've actually touched a Conan server before, which matters more than it sounds like it should the first time a mod update breaks your world at 1am on a Sunday.

What we run internally for Conan is sized comfortably for the new Enhanced floor, with room to scale up. You pick the slot count and hardware tier you want on the Conan Exiles hosting page and we'll size the box to match – I'm deliberately not quoting prices or exact specs here because they change, and the pricing page is always the source of truth.

A note on slot counts and the 70-player cap

Funcom caps Conan Exiles servers at 70 players. That's a hard engine limit, not a LOW.MS limit – no host on earth can give you an 80-slot Conan server, and if you see one advertised, somebody's fudging the numbers. In practice almost every server runs best well below the cap. A healthy PvP clan server is typically 20 to 40 active players; a tight-knit private world is often under 10. Pick a slot count that matches how many people will actually be online at peak, not how many people you've ever mentioned it to on Discord.

The map question, and why it matters less than it used to

Up until the Enhanced launch on May 5 2026, the single biggest call you made when spinning up a Conan server was which map to run – Exiled Lands or Isle of Siptah – and you couldn't have both at once. Since Enhanced, that decision has gone away. Funcom merged Siptah into the Exiled Lands as a connected region, so an Enhanced server hosts both worlds at once and players travel between them in-game without a server restart. Anyone with the base game can join the Exiled Lands. Players who own the Isle of Siptah DLC on Steam can additionally travel to the Siptah region; players without it stay in the Exiled Lands and lose nothing.

The two practical implications:

• You no longer pick at provisioning time. There's no "Siptah server" SKU to choose anymore – every Enhanced server is functionally an Exiled Lands server with Siptah accessible inside it.
• The DLC-ownership headache is smaller but didn't go away entirely. Mixed groups where some players don't own Siptah used to bounce off Siptah-only servers at the connection screen; now those players can join and just stick to the Exiled Lands. A clan that wants to actually do Siptah content together still needs everyone on the DLC – that part hasn't changed.

If you're staying on the Conan Exiles Legacy (UE4) beta branch for whatever reason – mod-stack stability, established Siptah base you can't bear to lose, taste – the old map-picking model still applies and you're choosing between two separate server types at provision time.

Ports, the Purge, and the obvious mistakes

Conan's default UDP ports are 7777 for the game, 7778 for Steam query, and 7779 for RCON. On a self-hosted box all three need to be forwarded. On a managed LOW.MS server they're open out of the box and you never think about them again.

A few things that come up constantly in support tickets:

• The Purge is a load event, not a feature. Large purges with a lot of NPCs spawning at once are the single most common source of lag spikes on a healthy server. If your server feels smooth right up until a Purge hits and then stutters, that's normal, but it's also a signal you're running close to the edge on CPU headroom. Tuning purge intensity down is a perfectly reasonable response.
• Building decay is your friend. Conan tracks every placeable on the map and syncs it to players who walk nearby. Abandoned mega-bases left behind by players who quit two months ago are a genuine performance drag. Leave decay on.
• Schedule a daily restart. Every 12 to 24 hours is plenty. It clears memory, it catches mod updates, and it prevents the kind of slow creep where week-three performance is mysteriously worse than week-one. With Enhanced's heavier memory footprint, restarts matter more, not less.

Mods, and how the LOW.MS panel handles them

Conan has one of the healthier modding scenes of any survival game, and unlike some games, it all lives on the Steam Workshop. Pippi, Age of Calamitous, EEWA, Emberlight, Fashionist, Northern Timber – the classics are all still going in 2026, and there are plenty of newer additions worth trying.

A heads-up if you're spinning up your first server in the weeks after the Enhanced launch: not every Workshop mod has been recompiled against the UE5 Mod Dev Kit yet. Funcom seeded the launch with several popular mods ready to go, but the long tail will catch up over weeks rather than days. Glance at each mod's "last updated" date on the Workshop before you install – if it's pre-May 2026 and hasn't moved, it may not work on Enhanced and the author may not be active. Worst case, dropping a non-functioning mod and adding it back later is a five-minute job in Mod Manager.

Installing mods on a LOW.MS server is intentionally low-effort. Open your server in the LOW.MS Control Panel, head into Mod Manager, search the Steam Workshop from inside the panel, and click install. The panel handles the modlist file for you. If you'd rather hand-edit modlist.txt directly you can do that from the File Manager – both approaches work, and I've met people who strongly prefer each.

Two things I've learned the hard way about modded Conan servers:

• Wait a day or two after a Funcom patch before updating mods. Mod authors need time to catch up. Updating the server the minute a patch drops is how you end up with a broken world on a Sunday night.
• Keep mod versions pinned across the group. Mismatched versions are the single most common cause of "I can't connect" tickets, and the error message Conan shows is famously unhelpful.

The rest of the panel, in the order you'll actually use it

Once your server's provisioned, the sidebar items you'll touch in a typical week are:

• Service Settings – server name, admin password, game mode (PvP, PvE, PvE-Conflict). This is the first stop after provisioning.
• Configuration Files – where ServerSettings.ini lives. Harvest rates, XP multipliers, purge settings, building decay timers, everything that isn't exposed as a simple toggle.
• Mod Manager – Workshop search and install, as covered above.
• Scheduled Tasks – set up your daily restart here. Five minutes of setup, months of smoother gameplay.
• Cloud Backup / Cloud Restore – automatic by default. Manual backups before risky changes (new mods, major config overhauls, accepting a Funcom beta patch) are cheap insurance.
• Current Activity & Stats – CPU, RAM and player count at a glance. First place to look when someone says "the server feels slow."
• Web Console – live server console in your browser. Handy for admin commands without having to log into the game.

For the step-by-step first-day walkthrough, we've got Conan Exiles: Getting Started and a deeper server settings guide. If something's gone sideways, the troubleshooting guide is the first place I'd point you.

So, should you self-host or rent?

Honestly? Both are fine. If you're the kind of person who enjoys running your own infrastructure, who's already got a capable box sitting idle, and who doesn't mind being on call for your own server, self-hosting is a perfectly respectable choice and I'd never talk anyone out of it. Conan runs fine on the right hardware at home – with the caveat that "the right hardware" is genuinely a higher bar under Enhanced than it was a year ago.

For everyone else – and that's most people, in my experience – managed hosting is the path that actually gets you playing the game instead of maintaining a server. You're paying a monthly fee in exchange for a time tax you no longer have to pay. Whether that trade is worth it is entirely a question of how much your weekends are worth to you.

If you've decided managed is the right call, our Conan Exiles hosting plans are here. Pick the region closest to your group, size the slots to how many people will actually be online, and we'll have you in Hyboria within a couple of minutes of checkout. If you get stuck, open a ticket from the panel – we're around.