Choosing a Host

**How To Find a Good Minecraft Host:**

There are several things you need to look for when determining which Minecraft host you want to use. Here's most of them:

* Hosting Location (USA, Canada, Europe, Etc)

* CPU Type (Look up CPU benchmarks or ask on spigotmc.org forums if it is good)
* RAM amount
* SSD storage or HDD storage (SSD or NVMe SSD is highly preferred)
* What the storage limit is
* DDOS protection (& amount)
* MySQL database(s)
* Support quality & speed (to test this you would need to contact staff via their ticket system or Discord server)
* Whether the host creates automatic backups of your server
* Reviews of host on TrustPilot (bear in mind it is possible to fake reviews but it gives a good idea of what many people think of it)
* Number of Player Slots
* There may be additional things as well.

**Keep In Mind:**

* Whenever a host mentions they have "Unlimited" or "Unmetered" features. That is **not true**. It means they have a limit that is stated in their TOS / Fair Use Policy. Personally I'd avoid these hosts altogether as it's essentially hiding their true limits. However, if their other features look good it may be worth looking into it further or contacting support to ask what their actual limits are specifically.
* Only pay so much attention to reviews of the host. They are important, but there are so many faked/sponsored/self-advertising/affiliate links that it's hard to tell which review is honest and which is trying to make money advertising to you. TrustPilot removes a lot of those issues, but those reviews *can* still be faked. That said, TrustPilot is one of your most valuable resources for finding accurate reviews of a host from many people.
* Everyone has different experiences with hosts. Just because someone else had an amazing or terrible experience with a host doesn't guarantee you will.
* If a host hides the CPU type they're using that's a red flag that they probably aren't using something very good. Although they may just have that information on another webpage such as "About Us" or "FAQ".
* Minecraft servers mainly use a single core for CPU. So when determining whether the CPU is good, check if it is on this list and if so, how high it is on the list. The higher it is means the better. On Windows you can ctrl+f to search for a keyword on the web page.
* More RAM does not always equal better performance. Due to how Java works, more than 10 GB of RAM will actually *negatively* impact your server's performance in most cases. This applies to ALL servers; modded & plugin servers alike. Adding onto this, if you give your server 8 GB of RAM but it only actually needs 3 GB to run smoothly, then those extra 5 GB are completely a waste of money. They won't make it run better. The server may seem like it is using them, but it actually only allocated the memory in case it needs to use it- it is not the same as actually using it.

**Final Notes:**

* For MC 1.15+ you'll want *at least* 2 GB of RAM. And 90% of new and optimized servers won't need more than 5 GB of RAM (with the exception of when you are generating chunks in your world). I ran an optimized Survival server with 60-70 plugins and 15-20 players at peak times with no lag for years at 4 GB of RAM, to give you an idea. This assumes your host has good specs.
* If your server map is completely new, you'll likely get a lot of lag from chunks being generated. The best way to prevent this is pre-generating your map before making your server public. This can be done with some plugins and mods by setting a world border then generating the chunks within that border. Additionally, you will probably want to use much more RAM than your server would normally require while your server is generating new chunks because the process can really eat up RAM.
* For small to medium sized servers personally I would not recommend map sizes past 10k x 10k. It is *plenty* and creating backups for those world sizes can be time consuming enough. Plus the amount of disk space you get per host varies.

### Recommendations

As I've mentioned above, the host that is best for you will vary by needs and location. However, if you'd like a good starting point for Minecraft hosts I'd suggest checking out Bloom.host (TrustPilot link) and Pufferfish.host (TrustPilot link). They both cost a bit more than the typical Minecraft host because most MC hosts are using shared resources and these 2 are primarily using dedicated resources. What that means is the hardware is being used only by your server rather than 4+ other servers too.

I used Bloom in 2020-2021 for a plugin server and 3 of my friends have used Bloom in 2022-2023 for private modded servers. I've read good things about Pufferfish but have not used them myself.