4Netplayers

What 4netplayers actually is

4netplayers is the game and voice server arm of 4Players GmbH, a Hamburg-based company that has been working in the games industry for more than two decades. It is not a general-purpose host: the brand covers game servers, TeamSpeak voice servers, and Sinusbot music bots, and nothing else. No web hosting, no VPS, no cloud buckets. For our game server hosting category that focus is the point — everything about the product is shaped around getting a multiplayer world online and keeping it there.

The catalogue is the first thing most buyers look at: 4netplayers advertises support for more than 150 games and mods, from survival staples (ARK: Survival Evolved, Valheim, 7 Days to Die, Palworld, Enshrouded) to shooters and simulators (Counter-Strike 2, Hell Let Loose, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Assetto Corsa EVO). New titles are usually added within 24 hours of release, Early Access included, and switching games on an existing server is free — a genuinely useful property for a group that rotates what it plays. Under the hood the brand runs on 4Players' ODIN Fleet platform, a Docker-based bare-metal deployment layer with AMD EPYC and Ryzen nodes that the same company also sells to game developers.

Pricing: what you really pay

Game servers are priced per game and per slot count rather than per CPU or GB of RAM, which is normal for this market and worth stating up front. The advertised floor for game server hosting is EUR 11.98 per month (tax included), and the currency list on the site shows the equivalent in roughly thirty currencies — USD 13.76, GBP 10.25, PLN 51.68 at the time of writing. Some titles carry a discounted introductory rate; the Plains of Pain page, for example, lists a 10-slot server at EUR 5.99 per month against a regular EUR 11.98. Slot counts scale the price: the same page shows 10 slots with a chosen server location at EUR 16.19 per month.

The distinctive offer is the all-in-one "Unlimited Gaming" subscription at EUR 14.99 per month: one server, 100+ games switchable at any time, up to 100 slots, 8GB RAM (stated as optimal for Java games such as Minecraft), 25GB of mod storage, no third-party branding on the server name, and month-to-month flexibility once activated. In our view this is the plan most groups should look at first — the per-title plans make sense when you know exactly which game and slot count you need, while the subscription trades that precision for the freedom to change games without re-buying.

What is missing from the pricing page is the usual server-spotter detail: no per-plan CPU core counts, no RAM figures on the slot-based plans, and no published bandwidth allowance. We found no hourly or pay-as-you-go option for the consumer products either — billing is monthly subscription. Voice and bot products (TeamSpeak slots, Sinusbot with 1GB of NVMe) are sold separately at lower prices, which is where sub-€5 headline numbers in third-party listings tend to come from; on the vendor's own pages the game server floor is the EUR 11.98 figure above.

Performance & infrastructure

The technology page is unusually concrete for a game host. Hardware is Intel and AMD CPUs with ECC RAM and NVMe SSDs. Power is dual-fed — each server has two power supplies on independent circuits, backed by UPS units and diesel generators — and core network components are redundant to match. Connectivity runs through multiple Tier 1 ISPs and major internet hubs with high internal and external bandwidth, and the network is sized so game traffic is not competing with other activity.

DDoS protection is included free on all products and built in three layers: upstream capacity and ISP cooperation for volumetric spikes, hardware filtering (Corero SmartWall, with real-time rules and a good reputation on UDP traffic, which is what game servers mostly speak), and per-game protection patterns developed with the game studios. The company states there is no shutdown of the server during an attack — the filter absorbs it. That is the right design, and we would rather see this stated with detail than a vague "protected" badge.

Backups are handled at the platform level: regular incremental and full backups stored on separate systems, with the option to create and download your own backups as well. For game worlds, where a bad mod update or a griefing session can wipe weeks of progress, the ability to hold your own copy off-platform is the feature that matters most. Server locations are advertised as 14 worldwide with more being added, and the web interface allows location switching at any time. We did not find a per-location list on the pages we checked, so treat "14 locations worldwide" as the vendor's count rather than an inventory we verified; European and US locations are confirmed across the product pages, with German (freenet) data centre infrastructure named in the DDoS documentation.

Support is staffed around the clock for technical questions, and provisioning is automatic — servers are typically up within minutes of ordering. For latency, this class of product lives or dies on location choice and peering; we have not run game-server ping tests in our own lab, so we point you at the benchmarks methodology rather than inventing numbers here.

Where it falls short

The slot-based pricing model is opaque in exactly the dimension technical buyers care about. You are told slots, mod storage, and (on the Unlimited plan) 8GB RAM, but not which CPU your world shares or how player counts translate into resources. Communities that outgrow their plan have little guidance on when to upgrade beyond in-game lag.

There is no published uptime SLA with credits that we could find. The redundancy story (dual power, UPS, generators, redundant network, multi-ISP) is better documented than most game hosts, but availability figures are marketing claims, not contractual ones. We also note the catalogue breadth cuts both ways: 150+ titles means the long tail of games gets less testing attention than the blockbusters, and mod support depth varies by title. Before committing, check where your group actually plays from — the location list is short enough that a bad region choice is visible in every match.

The product set is deliberately narrow. If you want a general VPS alongside your game server, an S3 bucket for world archives, or GPU compute, 4netplayers will not sell it to you — the company's ODIN platform serves that market separately, aimed at developers rather than players. And while backup creation is free, longer retention or managed restore services are not something we found offered, so the backup discipline stays on you.

Who should pick this

We would pick 4netplayers for a friend group or community that plays across several titles and values free game switching, included DDoS protection, and automatic backups over raw spec transparency. The Unlimited Gaming plan at EUR 14.99 per month is the shape of product we like to see: one price, everything included, no slot arithmetic. European players benefit most, given the German infrastructure base and the peering around it.

We would skip it for competitive esports deployments that need contractual uptime terms and published hardware specs, for very large public communities that will price out expensively on slots, and for anyone wanting to combine game hosting with general server or storage products. If you are building on game hosting as infrastructure rather than renting a place to play, the developer-facing bare-metal platform behind this brand is the more appropriate — and separately priced — tool.

Key takeaways

• Game and voice hosting specialist from 4Players GmbH (Hamburg), running on the ODIN Fleet bare-metal platform — game servers, TeamSpeak, and bots only.
• More than 150 supported titles with free game switching and new games usually added within 24 hours of release.
• Pricing is per game and per slot from EUR 11.98/month (tax included); the all-in-one Unlimited Gaming plan is EUR 14.99/month with 100 slots, 8GB RAM, and 25GB mod storage.
• Included free DDoS protection (ISP capacity + Corero SmartWall hardware filtering + per-game rules) with no server shutdown during attacks.
• Platform backups (incremental plus full, stored separately) and self-service backup download included; hardware is Intel/AMD with ECC RAM and NVMe SSDs on dual power feeds.
• No published uptime SLA and no per-plan CPU/RAM disclosure on slot-based plans; servers live at 14 advertised locations worldwide with EU and US confirmed.

Sources

• https://www.4netplayers.com/en/gameserver-hosting/
• https://www.4netplayers.com/en/technik/
• https://www.4netplayers.com/en/gameserver-hosting/unlimited-gaming/
• https://www.4netplayers.com/en/gameserver-hosting/plains-of-pain/
• https://whtop.com/compare/4netplayers,strato.de
• https://whtop.com/compare/4netplayers,ionos.de
• https://www.4players.io/newsroom/4netplayers-introduces-all-in-one-server-model/