Velocity Server Hosting

What does a Velocity proxy actually do?

Velocity is a Minecraft proxy built by the PaperMC team that stands between your players and your game servers. Everyone connects to one address; Velocity accepts the connection, verifies the account with Mojang, then hands the player to one of the backend servers listed in velocity.toml. Your lobby, survival world, skyblock and minigames stay separate processes, yet the player experiences a single network and hops between them with /server or a menu plugin.

The proxy itself never loads chunks, ticks entities or saves a world. Its job is routing, compressing and encrypting packets, which is why it needs a fraction of the memory a survival server does. Velocity accepts clients from 1.7.2 up to the current release, ships its own plugin API rather than BungeeCord's, and is the proxy PaperMC points people to now that Waterfall has been retired.

One practical point: your Velocity plan runs the proxy only. Lobby and game servers live on their own Paper, Purpur or Fabric plans, and you register their addresses with the proxy. Keeping them apart means a lag spike on survival never freezes the lobby.

How much RAM and CPU does Velocity need?

Less than most people expect: Bronze 4 GB covers the majority of networks. PaperMC's own tuning guide suggests roughly 512 MB of heap per 500 concurrent players plus about 1 GB of headroom, and in containers it recommends giving the heap only half of the available memory. On that math a 4 GB plan leaves enough heap for around 1,000 concurrent players, provided your proxy plugins are reasonable.

Core count matters more than raw memory here. Unlike a Minecraft game server, Velocity is not bound to one main thread; Netty spreads connections across workers, and compression plus encryption grow with every player online. Bronze through Diamond run on 4 vCores of Ryzen 9 9950X, Emerald on 6 and Xtreme on 12, so if you are aiming for thousands of players on a single proxy, those extra cores are what you are really paying for.

Memory usage climbs mainly because of plugins: a large LuckPerms dataset, analytics and statistics plugins, or Geyser running on the proxy for Bedrock players. If that describes your setup, one tier up buys comfortable headroom.

How do you set up modern forwarding correctly?

Modern forwarding is Velocity's way of passing each player's real UUID, IP address and skin data to the backend, signed with a shared secret, and it is the most secure option for 1.13 and newer servers. In velocity.toml you set player-info-forwarding-mode to modern; the key lives in the forwarding.secret file referenced by forwarding-secret-file.

On each Paper backend, turn online-mode off in server.properties and keep settings.bungeecord at false in spigot.yml. Then open config/paper-global.yml, set proxies.velocity.enabled to true, paste the same key into proxies.velocity.secret and match proxies.velocity.online-mode to the proxy. Paper 1.18.2 and older keep these options in paper.yml under settings.velocity-support.

Backends older than 1.13 need legacy (BungeeCord-compatible) forwarding or the bungeeguard mode, which adds a token. Fabric servers get modern forwarding through FabricProxy-Lite, and Forge 1.14+ through ProxyCompatibleForge.

Why bother? With online-mode off, anyone who finds a backend port could otherwise join under any username. With modern forwarding enabled, a connection without the secret simply gets turned away.

Which velocity.toml settings matter first

Start with the [servers] block. Give each backend a short name and point it at the IP:port shown in its panel. The try list beneath it decides where players land on login and where they go when kicked from a server, so put your lobby first and a second lobby or a lightweight limbo after it; that keeps people on the network while survival restarts.

[forced-hosts] maps hostnames to servers, so someone typing survival.yourdomain.com skips the lobby entirely. The motd line accepts MiniMessage formatting for gradients and bold text, show-max-players changes the cap displayed in the server list, and ping-passthrough can surface a backend's description or mod list there instead.

Under [advanced], compression-threshold and login-ratelimit behave well at their defaults, though tightening login-ratelimit helps during bot waves. Leave haproxy-protocol off unless HAProxy genuinely sits in front of the proxy; turning it on otherwise blocks every normal client. Most edits, including server lists and forced hosts, apply with /velocity reload without a full restart.

Migrating from BungeeCord or Waterfall

PaperMC announced Waterfall's end of life in March 2024 and recommends Velocity instead, so if you still run a BungeeCord-style network this is a sensible time to move. Plugins are the first thing to audit: BungeeCord plugins do not load on Velocity, so check whether each one on your list has a Velocity build. Big ones such as LuckPerms do, and because both versions can share the same database, your permission groups carry over intact.

On the backends you disable the bungeecord flag in spigot.yml and enable Velocity support in paper-global.yml. Backend plugins that talk over the BungeeCord plugin messaging channel keep working as long as bungee-plugin-message-channel stays enabled in velocity.toml. Take a panel backup of the old config.yml and every backend before you begin. A clean approach is to stand Velocity up on its own plan, test it with staff, and only then repoint your domain, so regular players barely notice the switch.

Designing the network behind the proxy

A healthy network keeps the proxy lean and pushes real work to the backends. A small Paper lobby with a modest view distance is usually enough for the spawn area, while world-heavy modes such as survival, skyblock or modded servers get their own plans sized for their RAM needs. When traffic grows, splitting the lobby into two instances often helps more than upsizing the proxy.

For centralized permissions, a common pattern is running LuckPerms on both the proxy and every backend, all pointed at one shared MySQL or MariaDB database. ViaVersion can sit on the proxy to admit players on other client versions, and Geyser plus Floodgate both have Velocity builds if you want Bedrock players in. Finally, add a limbo server such as NanoLimbo at the end of the try list: during restarts players wait there instead of being dropped from the network.