Real prices, not "from $1" teasers: pick your player count and what you run, and see the exact monthly cost of a server that won't lag.
Heuristic: 2 GB base for vanilla + ~154 MB per concurrent player, rounded up. Every plan upgrades in one click with the world preserved, so starting small is safe.
Hardware and tooling tuned specifically for Minecraft — not a generic VPS with a wiki page bolted on.
Every server runs in its own isolated container with the RAM and CPU of your plan reserved up front — a busy neighbor can never eat your ticks.
Snapshot your whole world in one click, stored off-server. Creeper took the base? Roll back just as fast.
Try it — hit install. Or see how modpack hosting works.
Console, backups, files, mods, sharing — all where your least technical friend can find them. Invite co-owners as operators or viewers.
Keep up to five saves on a single plan — survival, skyblock, a modded run — each with its own version, mods, and settings. Switch in one click; your join address never changes.
Turn on crossplay (Paper, Fabric, NeoForge) and friends on PC, console, and phone all spawn in the same world.
Minecraft runs your whole world on a single CPU core — per-core speed sets your TPS, not core count. Our Zen 4 Ryzen 7 7700 lands within 5% of AMD's Zen 4 flagship on that core and well ahead of the Zen 3 chips many hosts still sell, with every world on NVMe so chunks load as fast as you fly.
Yes, the newest 9950X is ~15% faster per core — we chart it anyway. Real numbers over marketing.
Self-hosting looks free but runs on electricity: an always-on 100–200 W machine costs roughly $5–15/month at typical rates, before the hardware itself, your upload bandwidth, and the router wrestling covered in our port forwarding guide.
Realmsis Mojang's $7.99/month subscription, genuinely simple, but vanilla-only with a 10-player cap: no plugins, no mods, no console or file access.
Hosting prices by RAM, and RAM follows what you run, which is exactly what the calculator above computes. The full breakdown (including the pricing tricks to watch for when comparing hosts) is in our cost guide; the sizing logic lives in the RAM calculator.
Hosted servers run roughly $5–15/month for vanilla friend groups and $15-40/month for heavy modded setups: price tracks RAM. Realms is $7.99/month (vanilla only, 10 players). Self-hosting costs electricity: an always-on PC is typically $5–15/month at average rates.
RAM is the resource Minecraft actually exhausts. Players drive RAM (each keeps chunks loaded), but mods drive it harder: a 200-mod pack needs 8+ GB before the first player joins. Sizing by RAM is sizing by what prevents lag.
Rarely, once you count it honestly: electricity for an always-on machine roughly equals a small plan's price, before hardware wear, your upload bandwidth, and the setup and maintenance time. Self-host for the hobby, rent for the playing.
On SpawnFort, no: backups, DDoS protection, and the panel are in every plan, and upgrades are prorated. When comparing hosts, watch for teaser first-month pricing and per-feature upcharges for backups or extra ports.
Pick a plan, deploy in one click, and invite the whole Discord tonight.