Mini Plan

• 2 vCPU
• 4 GB RAM
• 80 GB SSD

Order the Mini plan

What four gigabytes actually holds

Mini is the floor of the range: 4 GB of memory, 2 vCPU and 40 GB NVMe. That is a vanilla world for a group of friends, a Paper server with the plugins most people run first (permissions, homes, an economy, a claim plugin), or a creative flat world where nothing is generating chunks behind you.

The memory is what runs out first on a small server, and it runs out for a boring reason: every chunk a player walks into is held in memory while it is active. Two people exploring in opposite directions cost more than six people standing in one town, which is why player counts alone never answer the question.

What Mini is not is a modpack machine. A pack of a hundred mods loads its own classes and its own worlds before a single player joins, and the plans above exist for exactly that.

Who this size is for

A family server. A Discord of five to ten people who play in the evening. A survival world that has run for a year without a single mod. Those all sit comfortably here, and the money you do not spend on memory you will never miss.

If you are the person who is going to install RLCraft in three weeks, start one step up instead of moving later. Moving is painless here, but choosing right the first time is cheaper.

What it costs and what happens next

Mini is EUR 8.49 per month, or EUR 6.99 per month if you pay for twenty-four months at once. Every plan includes DDoS protection, a free subdomain, our own panel and the AI Copilot, so the price on the card is the price of the server.

Outgrowing it looks like this: the console starts printing that the server cannot keep up, and restarts get slower. Support moves you to Starter without downtime and without touching the world.

Keeping a small server healthy

The three settings that decide how far 4 GB stretches are view distance, simulation distance and how many entities you let pile up. Drop the view distance from ten chunks to six and a Mini server stops sweating; nobody notices in survival, and the tick loop gets its evening back.

Mob farms are the other half. A farm that keeps a thousand entities alive costs more than every player on the server put together, and on this size that shows up first. Killing them on a timer is a plugin, not an upgrade.

If the server does struggle, ask the Copilot in the panel before you buy memory. Nine times out of ten it points at a setting or a plugin, and the tenth time it tells you the plan really is too small.

Starting here and staying here

Plenty of servers live on Mini for years. A whitelisted survival world with ten friends, played twice a week, does not grow into anything larger, and paying for headroom that nobody uses is not a virtue.

What does change is the map. A world that has been explored for a year is a lot of chunks on disk, and 40 GB NVMe is the number to watch rather than the memory.

Your first evening on a Mini server

Order it, pick the region closest to most of your friends, and the server is up while you are still typing the address into Discord. Set the whitelist before you share it, change the view distance, and decide whether you want a claim plugin before the first house exists rather than after the first argument.

The subdomain matters more than people expect on a small server: an address people can spell is the difference between five friends joining and three of them giving up.

Mini against a Realm

A Realm is simpler and it is also a wall: ten players, no plugins, no files, no console. Mini costs money in the same order of magnitude and gives you a machine instead of a subscription, with the world downloadable whenever you want it.

If you never intend to install anything, a Realm is fine. The moment you want a permissions plugin, a map or a Discord bridge, the difference stops being taste and becomes possible against impossible.

Questions people ask before taking Mini

Can I run a modpack on it? A small one, yes, and a big one badly. Can I add players later? The plan does not count them, so the limit is what the memory carries rather than a number we sell you. Can I move up later? Same day, same world, same address.

Can I get a refund if it turns out too small? Support moves you up instead, which is usually what people actually want; the difference in price is settled on the next term.

Does the free subdomain work on the smallest plan? Yes. Nothing on this list is held back for the larger plans, and that is deliberate: the plan sells memory, not features.

The honest downsides of the smallest plan

Two cores means a heavy redstone contraption can slow the world while you watch it happen, and there is no room to hide that behind spare capacity. A backup of a large explored map takes longer here than on the plans with more disk. And if half your group plays on console, the crossplay setup wants a little more room than Mini has spare.

None of that makes it the wrong plan for a small survival world. It makes it the wrong plan for a project that is quietly turning into a network.

Two friends, one seed, no plugins

The most common Mini server in our panel is embarrassingly simple: vanilla, whitelist on, four people, one seed they have played since spring. No permissions, no economy, nobody typing commands. For that shape the disk fills long before the memory does, and the only maintenance anybody does is renaming the backup folder.

Servers like that survive years because nothing about them is fragile. Every plugin you skip is a thing that cannot break during dinner.

The same step on Bedrock

If your group plays on phones and consoles instead of PCs, the equivalent here is Camp on the Bedrock list at 2 GB. A Bedrock server needs less memory for the same number of people, because it does not run inside a Java heap.

Want both groups in one world instead? Then the crossplay version of this step is what you are looking for, and it is the Java plan with the translation layer set up on top rather than a second server.

How to tell whether Mini is enough

Watch one number for a week: memory in use after the server has been up for a day with people on it. If it sits well under the ceiling on a busy evening, you are fine, and nothing else on the dashboard matters much at this size.

If it hugs the ceiling and the console starts talking about garbage collection, that is your answer, and the next step up is one click and no downtime.

What the panel shows on day one

A console that is already printing the world load, a file manager with the server folder in it, a start and stop button, and a graph of memory that will be flat for the first hour. That is the whole surface of a Mini server, and it is deliberately small: there is nothing here you have to learn before your friends can join.

The one thing worth doing before anybody else logs in is deciding the difficulty and the whitelist, because both are easier now than after twenty people have opinions about them.

How it compares

If this gets tight, Starter is the next step up: 4 GB more for €1.80 more a month.

What runs comfortably on it

Mini carries 4 GB, and our own RAM guide lists these workloads as ones that fit inside it: RAM guide.

Our RAM guide names the Mini plan as the cheapest one that clears this workload: vanilla 1-5 players.

Where you can run it

A small server feels slow for one reason more often than any other, and it is distance rather than memory. Choose the region nearest your group at checkout: 9 locations across the US, the UK, the EU, and Asia-Pacific are included, and the Germany (EU) region costs nothing on top of the plan price. This plan is also available on 18 extra regions in the wider network behind Astroworld, next to the regions we run on our own hardware.

Other plans

Starter, one size up