I was hosting one earlier (named Ho eyo he hum) for several hours on the default port with carrier armor at 1500%**, and people were joining and playing*. Are you sure you have port forwarding set up properly, and that your firewall(s) aren't blocking the game?
Judging by the way the game paused every time I saved a ship in the hangar in-game while hosting, however, and the way people tended to quit after I did that several times in a row, I am betting that saving ships is lag-pause-inducing. It also got laggy in general later when there were something like 6 or 7 people on throwing tons of fire around simultaneously; People seem to like packing shittons of guns onto a single ship sometimes, and it is lag-inducing currently, it seems. I made and tested a ship with ~25 light guns For Science and it was causing lag for me while I was hosting whenever I fired or got shot at (and some other situations).
Anywho! I just made Super Admiral a little while ago, and replaced my individual turrets (which were slaved to a single mouse-aimed turret) with heavy turrets with spans on top of them.
(I'm still using a target slaver, but only because it's cheaper than another mouse aim module.
)
P.S. Oh come on, you don't need Hamachi, and it's evil***.
* I expect they were randomly losing connection due to errors as well, but I had no trouble hosting. (I started hosting my own because I got sick of random disconnections, actually)
** Because when I was playing in other servers, the carriers were being blown up every 5 seconds or so.
*** Having Hamachi installed can prevent games from hosting properly on your normal network if they are not properly coded to listen on ALL networks rather than just on one. E.G. You have Hamachi installed (or any other software which adds a virtual network in your list of networks, which is active and shows up as having an IP address for you, etc), when something tries to bind to a socket to listen for connections, the sockaddr structure includes a field for the IP address (which corresponds to your IP on the network to listen on). If the programmer is not aware that he can set it to INADDR_ANY (which is 0) to listen on all network interfaces, then you will have a problem if you have more than one enabled network interface on your computer, which is to say: If you have both a wired and wireless connection enabled, or if you have Hamachi installed, etc.