Hosting the original Left 4 Dead used to mean installing SteamCMD, opening ports and editing config files. On 2hours.gg you skip all of that. You pick a campaign, a mode and a size, and a dedicated server boots on a public IP in about five minutes. This guide walks through the deploy form, how friends connect, and the admin commands you get over RCON. Servers are billed by the hour.
What you get
- A real dedicated box: on a public IP, no port forwarding, and the game keeps running when a player leaves.
- All six campaigns built in: No Mercy, Crash Course, Death Toll, Dead Air, Blood Harvest and The Sacrifice, so nobody downloads anything.
- Native Source RCON: so you can run admin commands from the in-game console.
- By-the-hour billing: the server runs while you play and you are not locked into a month.
Deploy the server
On the deploy page, set three things and start the server.
- Campaign: the starting campaign, for example No Mercy (l4d_hospital01_apartment).
- Mode: Co-op, Versus or Survival. The campaign list filters to the maps that mode supports.
- Size: Small (4p) for Co-op, or Medium (8p) for 4v4 Versus.
- Join password: optional. Set one to keep the server private to your group.
How friends join
Once the server card shows an IP, your friends open the console with the ~ key and connect. If you set a Join password on deploy, share it so only your group can get in.
connect IP:27015Admin over RCON
You deployed the server, so you are the admin. Open the console with ~, log in once with the RCON password from your server card, then prefix commands with rcon.
rcon_password yourpassword
rcon changelevel l4d_farm01_hilltop
rcon status
rcon sv_alltalk 1
rcon kick <name>Deploy a Left 4 Dead server by the hour