Running a Minecraft server on a cheap dedicated server

Game hosting companies sell Minecraft by the player slot or by the gigabyte of RAM, and the prices add up quickly once your community grows. A cheap dedicated server gives you the whole machine for one monthly price, with no slot limit and room for more than one game.

Clock speed beats core count

The Minecraft server does most of its work on a single main thread. That means a fast four-core chip will usually run it better than a slow 32-core one. Look for high clock speed CPUs like the Xeon E-2200 series or Ryzen, rather than the many-core server chips that look impressive on paper.

The extra cores still help. Plugins, world generation, backups and a second server can all run on them without stealing time from the main game thread.

How much RAM

• Vanilla or Paper with up to 20 players: 8 GB is enough.
• A modded pack or 50 players: 16 GB.
• A network with a proxy, a lobby and several game servers: 32 GB or more.

Give the Java process only what it needs. Assigning 30 GB to a server that uses 6 GB makes garbage collection pauses longer, not shorter.

Storage

World files are lots of small reads and writes, so an SSD makes chunk loading noticeably smoother than a hard drive. NVMe helps busy servers with lots of exploration. Keep backups somewhere else, either on a second drive or a cheap storage server in another city.

Setting it up

Install a minimal Linux distribution, then either run the server yourself with a startup script or use a panel. Pterodactyl, AMP and Crafty all make it easy to run several servers on one machine, give friends limited access and schedule restarts and backups.

Open only the ports you need, run the server as its own user and keep regular off-machine backups. Griefing is fixable. A lost world is not.

Picking the city

Ping matters more than anything else for players. Put the server in the city closest to most of them. For North America, Dallas and Chicago keep both coasts reasonable. For Europe, Frankfurt or Amsterdam.

What it costs

A four-core server with 16 GB of RAM and an SSD often costs about the same as a 16 GB plan at a game host, but with no slot limit and the freedom to run anything you like alongside it. Marked-down machines bring the price down further, so check the game server aisle before you buy.