So you've been playing Enshrouded with a couple of friends, you're maybe ten hours in, and somebody has just logged off mid-dungeon — again — and taken the whole world with them. That's the moment most people start Googling how to host a proper dedicated server. This is the guide for that moment.
We run Enshrouded servers over at LOW.MS, so yes, this is going to end up pointing at our plans. But the first half is genuinely just the tradeoffs — self-hosting vs paying someone else to deal with it — because it's worth understanding before you hand over a card.
Self-hosting vs a hosted server
Enshrouded does ship with a dedicated server tool, and if one person in your group has a spare machine sitting in a cupboard running Linux, go for it. Honestly. It's a perfectly valid path.
The catch is that "spare machine in a cupboard" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What actually tends to happen is someone hosts it on their main gaming PC — which means the server is only up when they're at their desk, your framerate in-game is fighting the server for CPU, and the second they close the lid to go to bed, Embervale blinks out of existence for everyone else. Add port forwarding, double-NAT on some ISPs, firewall rules, and keeping the server binary updated every time Keen Games ships a patch, and the "free" option starts feeling less free.
A hosted server flips all of that. It's on 24/7, it's running on hardware that isn't also trying to render your game, the networking side is already done, and updates are a button in a control panel. That's really the whole pitch — you're paying to not think about any of this.
What you actually get on a LOW.MS Enshrouded server
Here's what's in the box, minus the marketing.
- DDoS protection on every server — not an upsell, not a tier, just on.
- Automatic cloud backups so when someone inevitably blows up the main base with a grenade arrow, you've got a rollback.
- Multi-region: EU, UK, and North America. You pick which one at checkout based on where most of your group lives.
- 24/7 support from humans who actually play the games we host. Tickets don't sit in a queue for three days.
- Full file access via SFTP if you want to get your hands dirty with
enshrouded_server.jsondirectly. - A live web console in the panel so you can watch the server boot, tail logs, and send commands without opening an FTP client.
- Instant provisioning — from checkout to "connect now" is usually a few minutes.
The hardware under all of this is modern high-clock AMD Ryzen — the kind of chips that actually matter for a game like Enshrouded, where single-thread performance carries most of the tick work. We're competitively priced against the big names; we'd rather you go check the pricing page than have me type numbers into a blog post that'll be stale in three months.
Ordering, briefly
There isn't much to say here because we've deliberately kept it boring. Go to the Enshrouded page, pick how many slots you want (up to 16), pick a region, pay. The server provisions itself and drops into your account a few minutes later with connection details ready to share.
One thing worth flagging — pick the region before the slot count gets you excited. Latency matters more than people think in Enshrouded, especially once you're into combat encounters with the tougher Shroud enemies. A snappy 8-slot server in the right region beats a laggy 16-slot one every time.
First-time setup
Once the server's alive, head to https://control.low.ms and log in, then click through to your new server, and you've got Service Settings, Configuration Files, File Manager, Web Console and the rest of the usual suspects down the left.
For the initial walkthrough — naming the server, setting a password, picking a difficulty preset (Default, Relaxed, Hard, Survival, or Custom), and getting your friends connected — we've got a step-by-step in the Enshrouded getting started guide. If you just need the connection instructions to send to the group, how to join your Enshrouded server is the shorter read.
The config file lives at the server root and is editable straight from the File Manager — or via SFTP if that's more your speed. Most of what you'd want to change is in there: difficulty values, voice chat toggles, the lot. We wrote a deeper dive in the Enshrouded server settings guide that goes through the useful knobs without drowning you in every single field.
Migrating a world you've already been playing on someone's PC? That's covered too — see transfer/upload your save to your Enshrouded server. It's mostly drag-and-drop, but there are a couple of gotchas around where the save actually lives on your local machine.
A few things we've learned running these
Small stuff, mostly from watching our own support tickets.
Restart the server after any big Keen Games patch before letting anyone connect. Not because anything's broken — just because version mismatches between client and server are by far the most common "I can't join!" message we see, and a quick restart after an update saves you the headache.
Leave cloud backups on. We turn them on by default, so really this is just "don't turn them off." Enshrouded worlds are the kind of thing you don't miss until you've lost one.
Talk to your group about difficulty before anyone rolls a character. Some of the harder presets change enemy behaviour in ways that a casual Tuesday-night group won't enjoy, and a few settings are locked once the world exists. Easier to have the five-minute conversation up front.
If you've got real opinions about the game's settings, our best Enshrouded server settings for co-op post goes further into what we actually recommend. And if you're planning to build something ridiculous together, the base building guide is worth a look too.
That's really it. Dedicated servers aren't complicated — the hard part is mostly just deciding you're done with the "whoever has the best PC hosts" phase. If you're ready for that, our Enshrouded plans are here, and if you get stuck at any point during setup, open a ticket and we'll sort it.