[douglas]

Wrong pace is not a valid reason to not use PBW because you can set the game to have whatever pace you want. You could set a time limit for each turn of several weeks if you wanted to, or just set it to After Last Player Upload only which ignores time limits completely.

I would guess the reason you want to use your own server is to prevent other people from joining the game, and PBW lets you do that too. First, you can put a notice in the game description on PBW that it's a private game. If anyone ignores that and joins anyway, all players must be approved by the game host so you can just deny the interloper's request.

In summary, I simply cannot think of any possible reason not to use PBW that you're likely to run into. It has enough options to accomodate practically any play style, gives the host complete control over who is allowed to join, automatically creates a discussion forum for each game (by default only viewable by players in the game), provides turns by email (unless you disable that option in your preferences) and by direct download, and in general just has pretty much any feature the developers could think of that someone might want to use for running a game of SE4.

The only reasons I can think of to not use PBW are possible downtime and if you have a truly gigantic game. PBW's downtime is generally only a minor and infrequent inconvenience, and I doubt you're going to get a whole lot better without paying a lot more money than it's worth. As for large games, PBW has a time limit on how long it takes to process a turn and a size limit on the savegame file, but these are both high enough that very few games will ever run into them. The one game I remember this being a problem for was Return to (Micromanagement) Hell, where every player started with 10 homeworlds, all tech, and a private cluster of about a dozen systems isolated from the rest of the galaxy, and fleet sizes in the thousands of baseships were standard. The turns started having to be run manually offline when it started taking over 20 minutes as I recall, which is rather a lot longer than the longest most games usually take.