Hosting Types

When you start looking at hosting your server online you’ll see many different answers of which none are wrong, but they’re not always suited to your needs. This page has a goal of helping you identify when you may need each type of hosting.

Commercial Hosting Options

The three most common commercial hosting types you’ll find in forum responses are:

Shared Hosting
Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
Dedicated Servers (Bare Metal / VDS)

Self-Hosting Options

When it comes to running everything yourself you have two options:

Rent hardware / compute in the ‘cloud’
Provide your own hardware and run at a data centre / your house

Shared Hosting Best for Majority

The most common type you’ll find is ‘Shared Hosting’, this is where a hosting provider will own a physical server and partition the resources out to clients and you will connect to / manage your server via a web panel and SFTP. If you select this style of hosting you should be careful and note that some providers will oversell the resources. Overselling allows for them to provide cheaper monthly plans but may come at a performance hit due to this over allocation. Others will provide a dedicated quota that is only allocated to yourself, this will be slightly more expensive but you will have the entire quota to your disposal whenever you need it (plus it will still be cheaper than a VPS / Bare Metal).

Traditionally this space was dominated by the likes of Nitrado, MCProHosting, Shockbyte etc… but in recent years players like Bloom, DedicatedMC & EnviroMC have dominated in this space offering Ryzen based solutions instead of the old school Xeons used by the legacy giants.

Virtual Private Servers Technical Users

The other common response you’ll see people mention is ‘grab yourself a VPS from Digital Ocean or Linode’. While you certainly can, it won’t be much better than using oracle cloud on ARM (which is free).

VPS instances have some differences to shared hosting, the core differences are.

Linux knowledge is required for setup
Patching becomes your responsibility
Shell access which allows you to run more than just Minecraft servers
Slower but higher core count CPUs
You get a Dedicated IP address rather than a Shared one
You can install a custom panel such as Pterodactyl

There are times when a VPS can make sense, a prime example is using a VPS provider that uses consumer ‘Gaming Grade’ CPUs (Intel Core i9 / AMD Ryzen 7 / 9). These would provide the same experience for Minecraft as using a regular ‘shared hosting’ provider and it would allow you to host say a web / database server, a discord bot or anything else you could imagine.

Bare Metal / VDS Enterprise

The final common type of hosting you’ll see people mention is, “go all out and own your hardware”. While yes, this has some advantages for a novice the prospect of having no one around for support can be unsettling. Bare metal gives you full, dedicated, system normally in 32 / 64 or 128 GB RAM configurations with 256 / 512 or multi-TB disk configs. Bare metal can either be built yourself and shipped to a data centre for a monthly fee or you can rent from providers such as Hetzner, OVH or ReliableSite for a monthly fee. This option can set you back multiple hundreds of dollars per month and would only be recommended for larger scale deployments.

Bare metal has a few advantages over the other types of solutions such as:

Complete ownership of the server data
Complete ownership of physical and networking resources
Some providers will offer a managed solution for an additional fee

Bare metal also carries the same differences to shared hosting as a VPS.

Self-Hosting Considerations

Option 1: Rented Hardware Advanced

If you can afford it, this is your better option. While this is the most expensive option your monthly bill does include hardware, electricity, internet and in some cases DDoS protection. A mid-range to high-end service will cost you anywhere from $100 per month, so it may not be suitable for those who don’t already have an established community.

This option is essentially the same as the Bare Metal option described above, but you take on full responsibility for software configuration and maintenance.

Option 2: Home Hosting Most Affordable

The cheapest option but does require some additional considerations. For one or two people this option may still make the most sense.

Do you have a suitable internet connection? Firstly run a speed test, this will give you an idea of where your current connection sits. A 50mbps connection for both upload and download should be sufficient for your regular household activities and your Minecraft server, remember your connection is shared between all devices so downloading something on your internet e.g. steam games will reduce the available connection to Minecraft.
Do you have proper IPv4 addresses? Yes, Minecraft can support IPv6 but it requires all parties involved to also support V6 connectivity. You also need to consider if you have a static IPv4 address.
Have you considered the overhead to security, power utilisation, heat generated, noise produced and cost of hardware? Protecting the rest of your network can cost you either in man-hours or hardware if you need to purchase additional tools to get operational. This should all be considered before you commit to running things from home.
24/7 Availability? If you’re not prepared to run a server 24/7 from your home are you players happy with the fact a server will only be online for a few hours a day.

If you do want to host things yourself we have documentation on how to do such things here.