Are you struggling to get players to join your Rust server? You’ve spent countless hours customizing and optimizing your server, but the player count remains low. Advertising a Rust server can feel like an uphill battle, but with the right strategies, you can attract a vibrant and active community. In this guide, we’ll dive into the most effective techniques to boost your server's visibility, from leveraging social media to engaging with gaming communities. Ready to turn your Rust server into a bustling hub of activity? Here's a few things you can do to get as many players as you can on your Rust server!

One of the most important things to get out the way as soon as possible is getting your Rust server on all the listing websites. While they aren't the best place to get players, the more places your players can find you, the better. The most popular places to advertise a Rust server online are:

Take the time to claim all of your servers on these websites, and make sure your information is properly updated!

Advertise on Social Media

To effectively advertise a Rust server on social media, you'll want to create content that's engaging and easy to get into. Platforms like Tiktok, Youtube Shorts, and Instagram are perfect for this. You can either take the route of making tutorials (informational things that help out all Rust players) or making entertaining videos that get the majority of peoples attention.

If you are a roleplay server, or a server that has a unique gimmick, showcase that gimmick fully in all of your content. Anything that your viewers see as unique will compell them to check out your server next wipe. If you are running events on your server, stream them on a platform like Twitch, Youtube or Kick to get more eyes on your server.

In addition to running your own social media, you can also consider the possibility of collaborating with content creators. Big or small, finding the right content creators can be the difference between your server being a desert and it being the next OTV.

Pick a Unique Wipe Time

Another website that your servers will be automatically shown on is https://just-wiped.net/. This website is extremely valuable for new server owners. If you pick your wipe time at a time that is popular enough for people to be looking at the site, but not popular enough for other server owners to wipe at, you can get around 5-10 players just from this website every wipe by itself.

If you are a new community, experiment with your wipe time until you find a niche time that your player base (and people looking for your server) really like. Most Rust servers like to wipe on Thursdays, and the most uncommon wipe days are Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays.

Keep Your Current Players!

Play on your server! Make sure that all of your Rust friends know about and are playing on your community at wipe! If you and your staff team don't play on your server, why would anyone else? While it may seem like common sense, this is a common thing that we see server owners not do when they start their Rust server!

Now, it's important to understand that there is a fine balance when it comes to letting your own staff team and you yourself play your Rust server. Don't give yourself items, and definitely don't admin abuse. Whatever you do, don't go out of your way to ruin people's wipes, those same people will come back when they have a fun time on your server!

The more that your community knows that you as an owner exist and that your staff team is friendly, the more reason they will have to stick around at the end of the wipe. You don't have hundreds of players (yet), and you most likely don't have the crazy custom plugins that larger Rust communities have spent tens of thousands of dollars to develop. Your main strength as a community is your people until you get big.

Don't Be Afraid to Experiment

One of the best parts about not having players on your Rust server is that you can do whatever you want to your server without people complaining. Don't get complacent with your plugins, and go out of your way to create a unique value proposition that other Rust servers won't be able to replicate. Servers like r/PlayReddit and rustfornoobs.com do this by making their community approachable to new players.

Make Sure Your Server is High Performance and DDOS Protected

One of the most important things you can do as a Rust server owner is ensure that the player experience is always the best it can possibly be. One of the biggest mistakes that new Rust server owners make is going with a Rust server host that doesn't fit their needs and doesn't follow through on their promises. Old school game server hosts power their game servers on server hardware with Xeon CPUs, meant to run lots of websites, but definitely not made to run a Rust server. In addition to that, the DDOS protection for old server hosts can be spotty at best, ruining your uptime, and killing your player count.

Fortunately, we can help. We offer 7950X Rust Server Hosting with CPU clock speeds that are up to 253% faster than the CPUs of popular Rust server hosts. If you need a provider that can scale with you as your community grows, a provider that follows through on their promises, choose Atomic Networks. We're so confident in our ability to provide great service, that you can try us out for the price of a cup of coffee.