Renting a server through G-Portal

Hey thought I'd post about my experience renting a server out through G-Portal for those of you who might be curious yourselves. My friends (about six of us) decided to rent out a server so we as a group didn't have to rely on me being online to use the world. We'd been working on the world under my name for a good month or two and were all really into the game. We'd just beaten Bonemass at that point (back in March 2021) and wanted to start expanding our base.

I found G-Portal almost at the top of my search results when I looked up a dedicated Valheim server. $14 a month for a 10 slot server. A little pricey but splitting it between a couple of friends made it quite affordable. Getting my world onto the G-Portal dedicated server was an absolute pain in the ass. I don't recommend it if you aren't at least somewhat computer savvy. A lot of file navigation and command entering and whatnot. What made it more difficult and frustrating is that when I reached out to G-Portal support, they only sent me a link to a page on how to change your server files. A page I was already using for reference. It took me and two other friends the better part of an hour to get the world set up on my newly purchased dedicated server. I'm not afraid to say that I'm pretty dumb, but I wish G-Portal would be a little more accessible when it comes to porting your world over.

As far as any online issues go; I had none. My world ran great and my friends and I were able to play whenever we wanted to. We reached an end to the current content (this was before Hearth and Home) so we slowly stopped playing as a group. Around November I ended up cancelling my monthly subscription with the plan to pick it up again when future content releases. Here comes the kicker: G-Portal deleted my save world less than a week after my subscription ran out. They sent me emails warning me of this. But I was on vacation for Thanksgiving with family and wasn't checking my email at the time. This was quite a bummer and really hard news to break to my friends who had spent hundreds of collective hours working on this gem of a world.

So in summary, I'm pretty disappointed with G-Portal as a service. The server itself ran great. My biggest issue is the customer service and lack of help. I know a lot of my frustrations are from my own doing and could have been preventable. But at the same time I still feel pretty cheated losing my save file less than a week after sinking $112 into this company for the better part of 8 months. I won't be going through them again. Still love the game. Just a little demoralized after losing all that time I spent in the game. But I know when Mistlands comes out I'll probably restart all over again just like a lot of you will.