High performance Minecraft server hosting

The one thing that decides it

A Minecraft server updates its world twenty times a second. Each of those updates is a tick and each tick has fifty milliseconds to move every mob, run every hopper, step every piece of redstone, load whatever chunks people walked into, apply weather and growth, and answer everybody who did something.

All of that happens on one thread. That is not a limitation of any host, it is how the game is built, and it has been true since the first multiplayer server. It is also the reason a hosting page full of core counts is answering a question nobody asked.

So the honest definition of high performance here is narrow: how much of those fifty milliseconds is still free when the server is at its busiest. Everything else is downstream of that.

Why the memory number is the one everybody sells

Memory is easy to sell because it is easy to compare. Eight against twelve against twenty four is a number anybody can rank, and it does decide real things: how many plugins load, how many chunks stay in memory, how many players can be spread across a world before it starts pushing things out.

What it does not decide is whether a tick finishes on time. A server can have half its memory free and still be four ticks a second behind, and that is the case where buying the next size up is money spent on the wrong half of the problem.

The reverse is just as true. A server that is genuinely out of memory is not helped by a faster core, and we say that on our own plan pages next to the prices, because the alternative is selling somebody the more expensive thing that will not work.

How to tell which half is your problem

The third row is worth reading twice. The most common cause of a server at four ticks a second is not the machine at all: it is tens of thousands of loaded entities, or a chunk loader keeping an area awake that nobody has visited in months. No plan on any host fixes that, and buying one is the expensive way to find out.

How our performance check finds that in about seven seconds

Four questions worth asking, including to us

What our Performance line changes, in one paragraph

Every Performance plan carries the memory of the plan it is named after, plus vCPU that are reserved for your server on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, a full thread each, so it is never a smaller server. What changes is what sits underneath: a faster machine, an NVMe slice of its own instead of one shared with the neighbours, and a faster network port. That is the whole difference. Right now there is no difference to pay. The Performance line sits on the price of the standard line, because the upgrade to it is free for a limited time: the faster machine, the NVMe slice of its own and the faster network port are all included at the standard price for as long as that offer runs.

What we do print is the processor these plans run on, an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, because that is the part of the machine you can actually look up and compare. What we leave out is the rest of it: how many of those chips there are, how much memory sits next to them and how the disks are arranged. That changes the week we swap a machine, a page that lists it is wrong the morning after, and none of it decides whether your server holds twenty ticks a second. The plan is what you buy, so the plan is what this page describes.

What Mini Performance gives you

What it costs

Every plan on the Performance line has the memory of the plan it is named after on our standard line, plus vCPU that are reserved for your server on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, a full thread each. Mini Performance starts at €10.00 a month on the twenty-four month term, against €20.00 for plain Starter at the same 8 GB.

Mini Performance, 4 GBStarter Performance, 8 GBStandard Performance, 12 GBPremium Performance, 24 GBUltimate Performance, 48 GBEnterprise Performance, 64 GBDedicated Performance, 96 GB

Common questions