Entry plans start at $3.99/mo, and pricing is per game because a heavier server process needs more memory and CPU: Minecraft: Java Edition starts from $10.99/mo, Rust from $24.99/mo. Four things move the figure — the RAM allocated to you, the game's own demands, the player count you are planning for, and your billing term, since the annual cycle includes one month at no charge. There is no setup fee. Per-game prices are listed on pricing.
Budget the memory the game needs at idle, then roughly 100–200 MB of headroom for each concurrent player. A vanilla Minecraft world with ten friends behaves nothing like the same slot count running a 40-mod pack, and heavier survival titles typically want 8 GB before you add anybody. A slot limit in a config file is a cap, not a promise — the CPU and memory behind it decide what holds up. See each game page.
A home machine is fine for one evening with three friends. It struggles as a permanent host: your upload bandwidth is shared with the whole household and wants roughly 1 Mbps per player, the box has to stay powered on, you have to forward ports on the router, and your home IP address becomes the join address. Rented hardware moves the process into a data centre with always-on DDoS filtering, NVMe storage and a stable address, from $3.99/mo.
Yes. The service runs on our hardware rather than yours, so closing the browser tab or switching your computer off changes nothing — people can join while you are asleep. The panel is only a remote control: it shows the live console, lets you stop, start or restart, and can run a nightly restart on a schedule if a heavy modpack benefits from clearing memory. Maintenance and incidents are the exceptions; see uptime and reliability.
All 123 supported titles run on the same platform, so an existing service can in principle be reinstalled as a different game. Order of operations matters: pull a copy of the current world out through the file manager or SFTP first, because reinstalling replaces the server files. Then open a ticket and support will confirm what is involved, including any price difference, as each game is priced separately. Browse the list on games.
Two routes. The one-click installer covers popular modpacks and plugin platforms: choose the version, let it deploy, restart. For anything not listed, stop the server, upload the .jar or mod folder into the plugins or mods directory over SFTP, start again, then watch the real-time console — version mismatches and load failures surface in the first few seconds. Generated config files are then editable in the visual editor. Our Forge modpack guide walks through one.
Scheduled automatic backups are part of every plan, so a snapshot exists without you setting anything up. To roll back: stop the server, pick the snapshot you want from the backup list, restore, then start again — restoring into a live world risks half-written region files. You can also download any snapshot to your own machine, which is worth doing before a big update; our uptime and reliability page explains why you should keep your own copy as well.
Yes, in either direction, from the control panel. Billing is worked out pro rata, so you pay the difference for the days remaining instead of starting a fresh term. Your world, mods and configs stay exactly where they are — only the resource allocation changes. Downgrading follows the same path, so if a modpack later runs short of memory you can step back up again. The three tiers are set out on pricing.
A first order carries a 7-day money-back guarantee: ask within that week and the initial payment is refunded. Renewals and upgrades are not covered, so after the first week the route is cancellation, which you can request at any time from the client area. That stops future renewals and leaves the term you have already paid for running to its end. Pull your world down before that date, because the files go with the service.
Three: monthly, quarterly and annual, each charged in advance for the cycle you choose. The annual cycle includes one month at no charge, which gives the lowest figure per month of the three. Unless you cancel beforehand, services renew automatically against the payment method saved at checkout, at the price current when the renewal falls due — so check the client area before a long cycle rolls over. There is no setup fee.
The panel is Pterodactyl-based and runs in a browser, so there is nothing to install. Sign into the client area, open your service, and the real-time console, file manager, visual config editor and scheduled tasks sit together in one place. For bulk transfers use FTP or SFTP: the panel's SFTP tab shows the host, username and port to enter in a client such as FileZilla, and you authenticate with your panel password.
Yes. Each server is a separate service with its own address, its own resources and its own entry in the panel, and they all appear in one list when you sign in — so a Minecraft world and a Palworld server sit side by side. Resources are not pooled between them: 4 GB on one cannot borrow from another. Billing is per service, so each can sit on a different cycle or be cancelled without touching the rest.
First separate the two kinds of lag. If everyone rubber-bands at the same instant, it is the server; if one player has high ping while the rest are fine, it is that connection. Then read the live console for tick warnings, plugin stack traces and out-of-memory lines, and note how close you are to your RAM ceiling. Send that excerpt with a timestamp to support — 24/7, ticket or live chat. Our lag guide covers the usual causes.
The same stack whatever you spend: high-clock AMD Ryzen CPUs, NVMe SSD storage and always-on multi-layer DDoS filtering, included on every plan rather than sold as an add-on. Clock speed matters more than core count here, because a world tick largely runs on a single thread — extra cores cannot share that work. NVMe keeps chunk loading and world saves off the critical path. The full list is on features.
Round the clock, through live chat in the corner of any page or a ticket from the client area. Include the server name, the game and what you were doing when the problem started — that usually saves a round trip. If the server itself is misbehaving rather than your configuration, say what the console showed, since that is the first thing we look at.