I am planning to shift from Aternos to a paid Minecraft server since the queue times are too long and I don’t mind paying a small amount for a server in general.
I am looking for a cheap alternative that has similar functionalities to what Aternos provides like mod support, console, server permissions, backups etc but with additional features expected from a paid server. I plan to play with not more than 6 players at once and even lesser players on average. My friends and I won’t be playing regularly and we won’t be in need of high specs as long as the server remains reasonably stable when running farms or other contraptions.
I tried to use Exaroton as it was made by the Aternos team and I don’t have any complaints with its features but its payment provider was just not accepting any mode of payment I offering. I dealt with this issue long enough to realize it’s not worth trying anymore.
There are a ton of Minecraft hosting providers out there but I want the community’s suggestions on which among them are trustworthy or value for money. I will go through all of the recommendations and choose the one that suits my needs the best.
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If you want a completely free alternative, you can use the Minecraft server on a old computer and playit to access it from outside your network. It’s harder to set up but it’s free.
Its extremely easy setting up a self hosted Minecraft server. The issue is security. I’d still go with any of the self hosted suggestions here rather than pay monthly for a Minecraft server. I’d rather run it directly on old machine with just port forwarding than pay for it.
To be frank, I don’t have the spare resources or time to self host a server especially when I haven’t had any prior experience. As stated earlier, I don’t mind paying for one. I just want to find a middle ground where I get the convenience of having someone else take care of the hosting for me and also not pay exorbitant amount of monthly fees for something I am not going to utilize often. I hardly get a few hours each day to play with my friends anyways so I want to make sure the time we spend together is worth it. I want to minimize the time spent booting up the server which made me look for a paid alternative in the first place and I’m sure figuring out to host the server by myself along with fixing the related issues would essentially be a different way to consuming the same amount of time if not more.
I found hosting a Minecraft server to have nearly 0 maintenance. Mine was a PO3 one, so I did need tto restart it often but that was automated. Just to add 2 more cents cause I dont think its time consuming at all.
If you are ok with learing something, then I suggest renting a VPS, its your own part of a computer in a data center. I had one from a local provider that cost 7€/month for 6 cores, 18gb ram and 256gb ssd storage, way cheaper than any mc server provider Ive seen. The thing is you have to do a lot yourself, but there are great tutorals on how to run mc servers on linux. You can run something like Lodestone and have a webui for your servers, but you dont have to.
Oracle cloud has a very generous free offer that i use that gives 4 arm cores and 24 gb of ram. I run about a dozen plugins including geyser and i never notice any slowdown and it never complains about missing ticks or anything. I only ever have about 4 people playing at the same time though
If you dont mind oracle then its a great option
Logicservers is what I use. Its good. The multicraft UI kind of blows though, its also an old version. But they provide the .minecraft folder over ftp so you get full control. A lot of minecraft hosting dont give you that control and they artificially limit you, like capping player counts. Logicservers prices things based on hardware, not “features” like player counts or modding capabilities.
I would go with a cheap VPS on Linode, Vultr or DigitalOcean. Linode allows you to easily deploy a Minecraft server through their one-click app marketplace.
