can i set up a home game server just to use in my home for multiple pc's

I have a variety of old cpu's and ram , motherboards, graphics cards , psu's etc ,more thatn enough parts to build a full desktop pc and meet game server system requirements , my question is this ,
my wife and i play ark survival evolved , we have rented game servers and many times after painstaking hours of building cities or fortresses etc within the game , the game servers have lost our data and we have to rebuild.
we have had enough and just wish to play together at home trouble is we both work at different hours and neither want our pc's on all the time with game running to access the game, what i mean is that we both want access to a server at our own home and work on our game building and constructing at different times , so i can log in when i get home without having to fire up my wifes pc and boot up the game then log in on mine or visa versa , can i use the hardware i have to install a server that we can hook up to our router or something to solve this issue , what would i need to achieve this
 
Solution


Give the pc a static ip adres and then just connect to it from steam by going to the servers tab and then adding the server with said ip adress. It will then show up in the favorties tab. Also I used to host on 6mb down and 0.4 up and up until 4 people was fine,


Yeah just launch the ark server client (not the game it's a separate thing) and leave that pc on. I do this to but opened it up to my friends with a simple port forward.
 
hi jaslion,
thankyou for the reply , i would like to open it up to friends but being on adsl i just dont think we would have the bandwidth to host , but thats ok ,it's more for us , so let's say i build this pc and install the ark server client , do i connect that server pc to the router then just access it from both our desktop pc's
 


Give the pc a static ip adres and then just connect to it from steam by going to the servers tab and then adding the server with said ip adress. It will then show up in the favorties tab. Also I used to host on 6mb down and 0.4 up and up until 4 people was fine,
 
Solution