Paper Minecraft Server Hosting

What is Paper, and how does it differ from vanilla and Spigot?

Paper is a high-performance Minecraft: Java Edition server that implements the Bukkit API, and it is effectively the standard core for plugin servers today. It started life as a Spigot fork, accumulated thousands of patches, and hard-forked away from Spigot entirely at 1.21.4 to become an independent project. That means Paper no longer waits on Spigot before moving to a new Minecraft version.

The biggest gains over vanilla are in the chunk system and entity handling. Paper spreads chunk loading and generation across worker threads, trims redundant calculations and shortens ticks in crowded areas. It also closes a number of vanilla bugs and duplication exploits by default, which is why technical players find TNT, carpet and rail duplicators dead on arrival; if your community relies on them, enable piston duplication under unsupported-settings in paper-global.yml.

Nearly every plugin written for Spigot runs on Paper without changes. The reverse is not guaranteed: plugins built on the Paper API won't load on Spigot.

Which plan is enough for a Paper server?

Because Paper squeezes more players out of the same memory than vanilla, most communities can start smaller than they expect. Bronze 4GB comfortably runs a survival world with a light plugin set for 5–15 players. Silver 6GB fits 15–30 players with twenty-plus plugins, and Gold 8GB is the right starting point for 30–50 players running heavier stacks like economy and land claims. For 50–100 concurrent players you'll land somewhere between Platinum 10GB and Diamond 12GB.

On Paper the bottleneck is usually how long the main thread takes to finish a tick, not RAM. Check a spark report before upgrading: if it doesn't show memory pressure or garbage collection trouble, extra gigabytes won't help and the fix is a farm or plugin. The 6 vCores on Emerald 16GB give Paper's chunk-generation and I/O worker threads room to breathe, which matters as much as memory on exploration-heavy servers. Xtreme 32GB is usually more than a single Paper instance can use; at that scale, splitting players across several servers behind Velocity tends to work better.

Paper configuration: which setting lives in which file?

Paper still reads vanilla's server.properties plus the bukkit.yml and spigot.yml files it inherited, and keeps its own settings in the config folder. paper-global.yml covers server-wide behavior: the Velocity connection, chunk send rates to players, the packet limiter and unsupported-settings. paper-world-defaults.yml holds defaults applied to every world; to override a value for one world, put only the changed lines in that world's paper-world.yml.

The settings people touch most are the anticheat section for anti-xray, per-chunk entity and item limits, hopper behavior, how many chunks are written per autosave tick, and the redstone implementation. Switching redstone-implementation to ALTERNATE_CURRENT can cut CPU use dramatically on large circuits, but it may change how order-sensitive contraptions behave, so try it on a test world first. The entity-activation-range and merge-radius values in spigot.yml still apply on Paper. Most of these changes take effect after a restart.

Where do you find Paper plugins, and how do you update them safely?

There are three main sources: Hangar, PaperMC's own plugin repository; Modrinth, where you can filter by platform; and SpigotMC, which has the largest archive. A jar with a plugin.yml is a classic Bukkit plugin that runs on both Paper and Spigot. One with a paper-plugin.yml was written specifically for Paper and loads only on Paper and its forks.

For updates, use the update folder: put the new jar in plugins/update and it replaces the old one on the next startup, so you never fight file locks on a running server. This behavior comes from the update-folder setting in bukkit.yml.

The near-universal Paper toolkit is LuckPerms, EssentialsX, WorldEdit, WorldGuard, CoreProtect and ViaVersion. If you're building a network, place your Paper servers behind a Velocity proxy; modern forwarding passes player UUIDs and skins to the backends securely. Before moving to a new Minecraft version, check each plugin's page for a support note covering that release.

How do you diagnose and fix lag on Paper?

Start by measuring. The tps command shows averages for the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes, and mspt shows how long each tick takes. If MSPT sits above 50, the server can't keep up. spark tells you why: run spark profiler start, stop it after a few minutes, and you get a web report showing which plugin, entity type or scheduled task is using the most CPU time. spark healthreport sums up memory and GC health on a single page.

Common causes on Paper servers, and what to do about them: pre-generate the world with Chunky so exploration doesn't trigger terrain generation; set entity limits in paper-world-defaults.yml for oversized animal and mob farms; keep per-player mob spawning on, since it spreads the load fairly; and lower simulation-distance to 4–6 to cut ticking in distant chunks. If you notice hitches during autosave, lowering the number of chunks saved per tick spreads the write load over time.