Here's the thing nobody tells you about Conan Exiles: the single biggest decision you'll make for your server isn't the host, the hardware, or even the mod list. It's the map. Pick Isle of Siptah and every single person who wants to play on your server needs to own the DLC, full stop. Pick Exiled Lands and you can invite anyone who owns the base game. We've watched more than one clan set up a gorgeous Siptah server, invite twelve friends, and then discover that half of them bounce off the Steam store page the moment they realise it's a paid expansion. That's the kind of thing you want to know before you order, not after.
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.
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. Community testing and years of forum post-mortems suggest you want roughly 8 GB of RAM and a quad-core CPU with decent single-thread performance to run a small to medium server comfortably — the "2 cores and 6 GB" minimums you'll see quoted online might technically boot the process, but they'll choke the moment someone starts a big build or the Purge rolls in. The server loves memory, and Conan's 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 Linux box. Every update is an SSH session. 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 comfortably over the community-recommended floor on both RAM and CPU. 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.
Picking your map
Two official maps, and the choice matters more than most people think.
Exiled Lands is the original. It's enormous, hand-crafted, and still the default for a reason — deserts, jungles, frozen north, volcano, named NPC camps, world bosses, the whole journey system. Base game only. Anyone who owns Conan Exiles can join. This is the map I'd point a brand new server at nine times out of ten.
Isle of Siptah is the DLC expansion. It's a different design philosophy: procedural vault dungeons, the Maelstrom, surges that spawn enemies and thralls in waves. It's a great map, and it's the right call if your whole group already owns the DLC and wants the newer mechanics. Every single player who connects has to own Isle of Siptah on Steam. There is no "base game players get a stripped-down version" fallback. They bounce at the connection screen. I cannot stress enough how often this catches people out.
Note that characters don't transfer between maps — each map has its own save database — so pick deliberately, not on a whim.
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.
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.
Installing them 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.inilives. 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.
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.