Real prices, not "from $1" teasers: pick your player count and what you run, and see the exact monthly cost of a server that won't lag.
Heuristic: 2 GB base for vanilla + ~154 MB per concurrent player, rounded up. Every plan upgrades in one click with the world preserved, so starting small is safe.
Hardware and tooling tuned specifically for Minecraft — not a generic VPS with a wiki page bolted on.
Every server runs in its own isolated container with the RAM and CPU of your plan reserved up front — a busy neighbor can never eat your ticks.
Snapshot your whole world in one click, stored off-server. Creeper took the base? Roll back just as fast.
Try it — hit install. Or see how modpack hosting works.
Console, backups, files, mods, sharing — all where your least technical friend can find them. Invite co-owners as operators or viewers.
Keep up to five saves on a single plan — survival, skyblock, a modded run — each with its own version, mods, and settings. Switch in one click; your join address never changes.
Turn on crossplay (Paper, Fabric, NeoForge) and friends on PC, console, and phone all spawn in the same world.
Minecraft runs your whole world on a single CPU core — per-core speed sets your TPS, not core count. Our Zen 4 Ryzen 7 7700 lands within 5% of AMD's Zen 4 flagship on that core and well ahead of the Zen 3 chips many hosts still sell, with every world on NVMe so chunks load as fast as you fly.
Yes, the newest 9950X is ~15% faster per core — we chart it anyway. Real numbers over marketing.
Self-hosting looks free but runs on electricity: an always-on 100–200 W machine costs roughly $5–15/month at typical rates — before the hardware itself, your upload bandwidth, and the router wrestling covered in our port forwarding guide.
Realmsis Mojang's $7.99/month subscription — genuinely simple, but vanilla-only with a 10-player cap: no plugins, no mods, no console or file access.
Hosting prices by RAM, and RAM follows what you run — which is exactly what the calculator above computes. The full breakdown (including the pricing tricks to watch for when comparing hosts) is in our cost guide; the sizing logic lives in the RAM calculator.
Hosted servers run roughly $5–15/month for vanilla friend groups and $15–40/month for heavy modded setups — price tracks RAM. Realms is $7.99/month (vanilla only, 10 players). Self-hosting costs electricity: an always-on PC is typically $5–15/month at average rates.
RAM is the resource Minecraft actually exhausts. Players drive RAM (each keeps chunks loaded), but mods drive it harder — a 200-mod pack needs 8+ GB before the first player joins. Sizing by RAM is sizing by what prevents lag.
Rarely, once you count it honestly: electricity for an always-on machine roughly equals a small plan's price, before hardware wear, your upload bandwidth, and the setup and maintenance time. Self-host for the hobby, rent for the playing.
On Campfire, no — backups, DDoS protection, and the panel are in every plan, and upgrades are prorated. When comparing hosts, watch for teaser first-month pricing and per-feature upcharges for backups or extra ports.
Pick a plan, deploy in one click, and invite the whole Discord tonight.