Minecraft Server Hosting

Which server software should you run: Paper, Purpur, Spigot or vanilla?

For a plugin server, Paper is the default answer. It runs Bukkit and Spigot plugins, handles chunk loading and entities far more efficiently than the vanilla jar, and ships with the spark profiler built in. Purpur is a Paper fork that adds a large purpur.yml of gameplay toggles such as rideable mobs, silk-touch spawners and AFK handling while keeping full Paper plugin compatibility. Spigot is the project Paper was built on until its hard fork at 1.21.4; today it's chosen mainly for specific needs, such as plugin developers who want the plainest API baseline.

Folia and its fork CanvasMC split the world into regions that tick in parallel, but they only load plugins explicitly marked Folia-compatible, so they suit many-core plans and large, spread-out player bases. Vanilla is Mojang's own server.jar: no plugins, mechanics exactly as designed. If you want content mods like Create, you need Fabric or NeoForge instead. Glowstone, Cuberite and Krypton are independent reimplementations that contain no Mojang code; none of them supports current Minecraft versions, so treat them as experiments rather than homes for a community.

How much RAM does a Minecraft server need?

A Paper survival server with a light plugin set runs comfortably for 5–15 friends on 4 GB. A 20–40 player community with economy and land-claim plugins wants 6–8 GB, and 10–12 GB is a sensible range for 50–100 concurrent players. Modpacks play by different rules: a pack with a few hundred mods struggles below 8 GB even with a handful of players online.

More RAM is not a cure-all. Minecraft processes each world on a single main thread, so redstone, mob farms and entity counts are limited by single-core speed. Hitting 20 ticks per second means every tick has to finish within 50 ms, which is exactly where the Ryzen 9 9950X's high clock speed pays off.

What actually fills memory is loaded chunks. At view-distance 10, each player keeps a 21 x 21 area loaded, or 441 chunks; drop it to 6 and that becomes 169. On busy servers, setting view-distance to 7–8 and simulation-distance to 4–6 eases both RAM and CPU load, and most players never notice the difference.

Plugins vs. mods: what's the difference?

Plugins run only on the server, so players connect with a completely normal Minecraft client. Paper, Purpur and Spigot all load plugins: upload the .jar into the plugins folder and restart. Avoid /reload on a live server, because many plugins leak memory or misbehave after it.

A typical starter kit looks like this: LuckPerms for permission groups, EssentialsX for everyday commands like homes and warps, WorldEdit and WorldGuard for building and region protection, CoreProtect for block logging and rollbacks, and ViaVersion so players on newer clients can still connect.

Mods change the game itself by adding blocks, dimensions and machines, and usually require every player to install the same mod list. That calls for a Fabric or NeoForge server, and neither of those loads Bukkit plugins. Hybrid servers that try to run both exist, but compatibility problems are common, so pick one side if you can. Download plugins from Hangar, Modrinth or SpigotMC, confirm they support your exact server version, and take a backup before adding anything new.

Why does pre-generating the world reduce lag?

Generating new terrain is one of the most expensive things a Minecraft server does. When players fly into unexplored land on elytra, the server builds terrain, caves and structures for every fresh chunk, and that is the classic cause of sudden TPS drops. The fix is to generate the world before anyone gets there.

Install the Chunky plugin, then run chunky radius 5000 followed by chunky start in the console to generate a 10,000 x 10,000 block square around spawn in the background. It works while the server is up but finishes much faster with nobody online, so starting it overnight is a common habit. When it completes, run worldborder set 10000 so the vanilla border matches and nobody wanders into ungenerated land. Use chunky world to switch to the Nether or End and repeat.

A large pre-generated world can take several gigabytes on disk, so budget your plan's NVMe space for the world plus its backups. The payoff is that exploring players trigger fast disk reads instead of terrain generation.

Running the server: server.properties, permissions, whitelist and updates

The core settings live in server.properties: max-players, motd, difficulty, view-distance, online-mode and white-list. To make someone an operator, type op followed by their name in the console; for finer control, build permission groups in LuckPerms and keep full op for yourself. For a private community, whitelist on plus whitelist add lets only listed players in. Only disable online-mode behind a proxy such as Velocity, otherwise anyone can log in under any name.

Don't rush updates. When a new Minecraft version drops, wait for a stable Paper build and for your key plugins to catch up, take a backup, then upgrade. A world opened on a newer version cannot be safely taken back to an older one. Watch the Java requirement too: 1.20.5 through 1.21.x need Java 21, while 26.1 and newer need Java 25.

If you plan to earn money from the server, read Mojang's usage guidelines first: cosmetics are fine to sell, but selling items that give a gameplay advantage breaks the rules.

How do players join, and can Bedrock players connect?

Java players open Multiplayer, click Add Server and enter the IP and port shown in your panel in IP:port form. The default Minecraft port is 25565; if your server uses a different one, the port has to be part of the address. To hide it, register a domain and point a _minecraft._tcp SRV record at the server so players can type something clean like play.yourdomain.com.

Bedrock players on phones, tablets and Windows have two routes. The first is adding Geyser and Floodgate to your Java server: Geyser translates the Bedrock connection into the Java protocol, and Floodgate lets Bedrock players in without a Java account. Our Purpur-Geyser-Floodgate package bundles both with Purpur. Geyser listens on UDP port 19132 by default. The second route, if your whole group plays Bedrock, is a dedicated Bedrock server such as our Vanilla Bedrock package. Xbox, PlayStation and Switch players have no built-in way to add custom servers, so plan a workaround if console players are part of your crowd.