The sums

By the hour, or by the month?

Most game hosts rent you one server, for one game, for a month, whether you play or not. ToastHosting counts the hours a server is on and a little a day while it's kept ready, and you can have Valheim this weekend, Abiotic Factor the next and Minecraft after that: put one away, start another, pay for what you played. Here's the arithmetic, with our real prices.

Four groups, one month

Your group	Here, credits	Here, about	A monthly server elsewhere
A weekend a month ten hours on, three days ready, put away in between	119 credits	$4.96	$15.00
A different game every weekend Valheim, then Abiotic Factor, then Minecraft, then Terraria: four weekends, each put away after	476 credits	$19.83	$60.00 (4 games = 4 servers)
Friday and Sunday, every week six hours a week, kept ready all month	354 credits	$14.75	$15.00
Every evening three hours a night, kept ready all month	1080 credits	$45.00	$15.00

With the server kept ready all month, the two meet at about 25 hours of play a month: below that the hour is cheaper, above it the month is.

What the hour buys you

A server that sleeps when you do

Five quiet minutes and it goes to sleep; half an hour and it switches off. Most games wake it the moment a friend joins. You never pay for an empty server all night.

Put it away for free

Taking a month off? Put the server away and it costs nothing at all. Your world, your settings and your mods wait; the next start downloads the game again and picks up where you left off.

Your own machine, every time

Every server gets 2 cores and 4 GB of its own, more memory at the flick of a switch. No shared box, no noisy neighbour.

Never locked into one game

A monthly plan is one game for a month. Here a server is a thing you start when the group wants it: Valheim one weekend, something else the next, the old world kept in case you come back.

No subscription to cancel

Credits come in packs and last 60 days. There's no monthly bill and nothing to remember to cancel.

When a monthly server is the better deal

Play most evenings and keep the server ready all month, and a flat monthly server for about $15.00 costs less than the hours would here. We'll say so on the page rather than hope you don't do the sum. ToastHosting is for the other groups: the ones who play a weekend a month, or two evenings a week, and don't want to pay for the empty nights in between. And a monthly server is one game for a month; here you put Valheim away on Sunday and start Minecraft on Friday without paying for both.