How Much RAM Does My Minecraft Server Need?
Six rows answer this, and one of them fit in our smallest plan. They are the same six rows our setup helper reads, so this page and the price you get quoted cannot drift apart.
The short answer
Vanilla with up to 5 friends
4 GB, the Mini plan. The first row of the table.
Plugins and 10 to 20 players
8 GB, the Starter plan. Memory grows with the player count, not with the plugin count.
A modpack
8 to 12 GB and up, read the modpack row that matches your mod count. Mods are what makes a server heavy.
The table below is the same one our price list reads, and everything after it explains where those gigabytes go.
Pick the row that looks like your server
| What you run | Memory | Smallest plan that clears it |
|---|---|---|
| Vanilla 1-5 playersLightweight survival or creative with friends | 2-4 GB |  Mini, 4 GB |
| Vanilla 10-20 playersSmall community with plugins like EssentialsX | 4-8 GB |  Starter, 8 GB |
| Light modpack (50 mods)Create, Cobblemon, or similar packs | 4-6 GB | Starter, 8 GB |
| Medium modpack (100-150 mods, up to five players; 200 mods needs the next step up)All the Mods Lite, Better MC | 6-8 GB | Starter, 8 GB |
| Heavy modpack (300+ mods)All the Mods 10, RLCraft, Enigmatica | 8-12 GB |  Standard, 12 GB |
| Large community (50+ players)Networks, events, or public servers | 16+ GB |  Premium, 24 GB |
Our guide counts a single server instance, not a network of proxy-linked servers. Split this into lobbies and you will need more than the number above.
Running a pack? Our modpack pages list the memory each one asks for.
One of these six rows fit our smallest plan
Mini carries everything up to a vanilla 1-5 players. A vanilla 10-20 players is what moves you to Starter, and a large community is what moves you to Premium. Our setup helper asks four questions, it can be answered 36 ways, and 5 of those answers come out on Mini. Ultimate, Enterprise and Dedicated never come out of it at all.
- 5 on Mini
- 16 on Starter
- 6 on Standard
- 9 on Premium
On Bedrock, read the top two rows
There is no Forge underneath Bedrock, so only your player count moves the number and the modpack rows do not apply to you. Read the top two. Our smallest Bedrock plan carries 2 GB where the Java one carries 4, on the same 2 vCPU and the same 60 GB SSD of disk, because the memory is the only thing an add-on server lets us halve honestly.
4 GB here is 4 GB
The memory on your plan is memory your server can actually use, all of it, at the same time. It is yours for as long as the plan runs: it is not shared with somebody else's server, it does not get handed to a neighbour who is having a busy evening, and it does not quietly borrow from your disk and carry on as if everything still fits. So the number in the table is the number you should read it as, and if your server ever runs into that ceiling it is your own world, your own plugins and your own players that got it there, never someone else on the same address. That is also why there is no reason to buy a size up for safety: the size you pick is the size you get, and moving up later takes minutes and keeps your world, your plugins and your settings exactly as they are.
Before you pick
Can I run a server on less than 4 GB?
Every plan on our price list starts at 4 GB. If you want less than that, our custom builds run from 1 GB up to 96 GB in twelve steps, and you pick the memory and the cores yourself.
Is more memory always better?
No. Java has to walk the whole heap when it cleans up, so the same pack on a much larger plan can pause for longer rather than shorter. Take the row that matches your server, not the row above it.
My server sits between two rows. Which one do I take?
The heavier one. That is the rule our own setup helper follows, and the reason sits in the code next to it: somebody on a plan that is slightly too small notices it as lag, and that is a more expensive mistake than a few euro too much.
Does a bigger world need more memory?
No. Only the chunks with players near them are held in memory, so a bigger world border costs disk space and not memory. It is also why the two ladders in our plans move separately: Mini is 4 GB of memory next to 60 GB SSD.
How much does view distance change this?
More than any other field. A chunk is a 16 by 16 column of blocks from bedrock to build limit, and the server holds every chunk a player can see. Our settings page lets you set view distance anywhere from 2 to 32 chunks: at 2 a player holds 25 chunks, at 32 that same player holds 4225. The field below it, simulation distance, runs over the same range, and our own help text there calls it "the biggest single performance lever".
If it still lags
Memory is not the only thing in your plan. Mini gives you 2 vCPU next to its 4 GB, and a pack that stutters is often short of cores and not short of memory. Our lag guide has the console line to look for, the settings that buy back the most, and the point where upgrading is the right answer.
Measure it instead of guessing
The table above gets you to a sensible plan, and after that the honest answer to how much RAM you need is what your own server does with your own players on it. The AI performance optimizer measures exactly that in a pass of about seven seconds: memory against the plan you are on, garbage collection, tick time and tick rate, the ticking chunks and every loaded entity by type. A tick has 50 ms, so it warns at 33 ms and calls 50 ms a server that can no longer hold 20 TPS. That number tells you whether more memory is your problem or whether a setting fixes it for free.
Four plans carry all six rows
Mini4 GBfrom €7.00 a month on a twenty-four month termStarter8 GBfrom €11.20 a month on a twenty-four month termStandard12 GBfrom €14.70 a month on a twenty-four month termPremium24 GBfrom €21.00 a month on a twenty-four month termSee all seven plansAnswer the four questions yourself
Every number on this page is read out of our own code when the page is built: the six rows from our RAM table, the plans from our price list, and the limits from the settings your server ships with.
Where counting memory stops helping
Every number on this page is about how much fits at once. None of them says how fast one tick finishes, and that is a different limit with a different fix. A world that has memory to spare and still stutters is waiting on one core, and that is what the Performance line changes: the same gigabytes you picked above, on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, with a disk slice of its own.
Written and checked by the Astroworld Hosting team. Last reviewed on 6 September 2026.
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.