Dedicated CPU or shared vCPU for a Minecraft server
Two hosting pages, the same memory, one of them twice the price and the word dedicated on it. This page is about what that word buys on a Minecraft server specifically, which is narrower than it sounds and worth more than it sounds, depending entirely on what your server is short of.
One thread carries the world
- 1 thread for the world
- vCPU is a share
- MSPT
- Chunk generation
- Backups
A Minecraft server does everything that happens in the world on a single thread, in order, inside fifty milliseconds. That is how the game is built and it has been true since the first multiplayer server. So the honest question is not how many cores you are given, but how much of one you are sure of at the moment the server is at its busiest.
The other cores are not decoration. Terrain is generated ahead of players on them, the world is written to disk on them, backups are made and compressed on them, and the operating system lives there too. On a server with people on it they are busy. They simply cannot be put to work inside the tick.
What the two words really mean
| Shared vCPU | A core of your own | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are given | A share of a physical core, scheduled against the neighbours | Time on a core that is not resold underneath you |
| On a quiet machine | Behaves like the whole core. This is the usual case | The same, and it stays that way |
| On a busy machine | Your tick waits its turn, and that shows up as stutter | Unchanged, because there is no queue |
| How you would notice | MSPT jumps at the same time every evening | MSPT follows your own player count and nothing else |
The middle row is the honest part. Shared is not a trick, and most of the time it is indistinguishable from dedicated, which is exactly why most servers are perfectly happy on it. What you are paying for on the other side is the evening when that stops being true.
When it is worth it, and when it is not
| Your situation | What is short | What to buy |
|---|---|---|
| Memory near full, tick time fine | Memory | A larger plan on the standard line |
| Memory half free, tick time climbing | One core | The same size on the Performance line |
| Both fine, players still complain | Distance | A region closer to your players |
| Both bad at once | Usually neither | Find the entity or chunk loader first |
What the difference costs here
Our standard line runs on shared cores. The Performance line carries the same memory and the same number of vCPU on a faster machine, with an NVMe slice of its own and a faster network port. The price difference is what the faster machine costs us plus our margin, and nothing on top of it.
| Size | Standard line | Performance line | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 GB, 4 vCPU | €8.79 | €17.59 | €8.80 |
| 12 GB, 6 vCPU | €13.59 | €26.24 | €12.65 |
| 24 GB, 8 vCPU | €23.99 | €47.09 | €23.10 |
| 48 GB, 12 vCPU | €47.99 | €85.39 | €37.40 |
| 64 GB, 16 vCPU | €67.99 | €114.19 | €46.20 |
| 96 GB, 18 vCPU | €87.99 | €142.99 | €55.00 |
The question that comes next
Processor is one of the two things a plan is made of; the other is the disk under it, and a shared disk produces the same kind of stutter for a different reason. That one has its own page.
NVMe against SSD on a Minecraft server, with what each size costs
Questions about cores and vCPU
What is a vCPU, and is it a real core?
A vCPU is a share of a physical core that the host hands to your server. On a quiet machine that share behaves like the whole core; on a busy one it is a queue. The number of vCPU tells you how many things you may run at once, and nothing at all about how fast any one of them finishes.
How many cores does a Minecraft server actually use?
One for the world, and that is not going to change. Chunk generation, saving, backups and compression use the others, so extra cores are genuinely useful, but they cannot be put to work inside the tick itself. That is why a longer core count on a hosting page answers a question nobody asked.
When does a dedicated core actually show up?
When the tick time climbs while memory stays half free. A modpack, heavy redstone, a crowded spawn or a lot of loaded entities are all cases where one core is the thing that ran out. On a quiet vanilla world with a few friends the difference is real and nobody will ever feel it.
Is it better to buy more vCPU or a faster core?
More vCPU helps a server that is doing several things at once: generating terrain ahead of players while saving and backing up. A faster core helps the one thread that carries the world. If the complaint is stutter rather than a long start-up, the core is what you are short of.
What does the faster machine cost here?
Every Performance plan carries the same memory and the same number of vCPU as the plan it is named after, so it is never a smaller server. Starter Performance is €17.59 a month on the twenty-four month term against €8.79 for plain Starter at the same 8 GB.
How can I tell what I am getting before I pay?
Ask which processor model it is and what the clock speed on one core is, whether the storage is NVMe and whether it is shared, and how many customers sit on one machine. A model number can be looked up; a phrase like high frequency cannot.
Delivery: most servers are handed over instantly and run within seconds of payment, the rest follow within 60 minutes during the day and within 12 hours at night.