Squad is available on Loafhosts with the same one-click setup as the rest of the fleet. This is the short version of what running one here looks like, and one change in particular that removes a recurring chore.
Mods update on restart, with no reinstall
This is the one worth leading with, because it sounds like a footnote and is not.
Squad mods auto-update on restart. No reinstall step, no removing and re-adding a mod to pull a new version.
Anyone who has run a modded Squad server through an update cycle knows the shape of the old problem. A mod updates, your server is now out of step with everyone connecting to it, and fixing it means going through a reinstall for each affected mod. That turns a routine restart into an evening. Now the restart is the whole procedure.
A large-player-count game is a single-thread problem
Squad runs up to a hundred players with vehicles and a live simulation, and that workload is bound by how fast one core runs far more than by how many cores there are. A large-scale shooter does not spread itself evenly across a big core count, so a spec sheet full of older high-core-count silicon reads well and plays badly under load.
Our fleet is AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D throughout, with DDR5 and NVMe. That choice is made for exactly this class of game, and Squad sits squarely in it. It is the same reason our Arma Reforger fleet, which is the largest thing we run, is on the same hardware.
A rebuilt settings editor (BETA)
The Squad settings editor has been rebuilt to match the newer editors across the panel, and this is the biggest change of the lot.
Settings are grouped rather than dumped in one list. Ten groups cover identity, players, teams, squads and teamkills, map rotation, match flow, vehicles, recording and admin access, with the number of settings in each shown on the tab, so you can see where you are going before you get there.
Every setting carries a plain explanation underneath and a hover tip, and anywhere the game only accepts certain values you get a real dropdown that says what each option does rather than a bare value you have to go and look up. The map rotation mode is the clearest example: instead of choosing between five strings, you pick between reading a level list in file order, reading a layer list, layer voting at the end of each match, or either list randomised.
One search box covers every settings file at once, and the file picker is unchanged, so you can still pick which file you are working in and drop to raw text when you want to.
The detail worth calling out is how it handles values outside the stock range. An out of range value is flagged as a warning on the field itself rather than blocking the form. A modded server deliberately running beyond stock limits can still save everything else, which is the difference between a validator that helps and one that gets in the way of the exact servers most likely to need it.
A reserved query port (BETA)
Squad servers now get a reserved, reachable query port alongside the main game port and the beacon port, matching the three ports the game is actually launched with. Previously the query port fell back to a fixed number that was never reserved, which is the sort of thing that works until it silently does not.
Two fixes worth knowing about
The player count in your server header no longer drops to zero. The count is refreshed in the background on a timer, and the figure it held was expiring sooner than the next refresh arrived. An expired figure was being read as nobody is online rather than ask again shortly, so a busy server could sit at zero or flick between the real number and zero while players were very much connected. The number is now kept comfortably longer than the gap between refreshes. It is no older than it was before, it just stops collapsing in between.
Mod update checks now admit when they could not check. Checking your Workshop mods asks Steam what the latest version of each one is. When Steam was unreachable, every mod came back unknown and the panel reported that as every installed mod is up to date. That reads as a clean bill of health when nothing had been checked at all. It now says plainly that nothing could be checked, or tells you how many were confirmed and how many were not, so a partial answer is never mistaken for a complete one.
Everything else a server needs
- Scheduled backups, restorable from the panel.
- Auto-restart with a crash watchdog, so a crash at four in the morning is not downtime until someone notices.
- Server up and down alerts to Discord, so the notification arrives in the channel your admins already watch.
- Scheduling for restarts and routine tasks.
- A full file manager with a recycle bin, so a wrong deletion is recoverable.
- Unlimited slots. Player count is not a pricing lever here, so scaling a Squad server up does not mean scaling the invoice.
Protection is included
Every region we run sits behind Terabit DDoS Protection: 500+ Tbps of volumetric capacity with 13+ Tbps of stateful filtering. It is on every plan and it is never an upsell. A Squad server with a public listing is a visible target, and visible targets get tested.
Start a Squad server on the order page, or see the Squad page, which now has real captures of the editor rather than a description of it. Game servers carry a 3-day refund window.