You’re probably here because you’re either looking to host a Minecraft server for the first time, curious about the process, or you’re finding that having a server on your personal computer isn’t at all convenient. In this article, we’re going to explore 10 reasons why it might be a good idea to switch from hosting a Minecraft server locally to using a Hosting Provider instead.
A Minecraft Hosting Provider is a company that will provide all of the resources needed to run and maintain a Minecraft server – usually for a monthly cost. The cost of this can actually be much lower than the cost of running a server on your personal computer. Along with the resources, you’ll normally get access to a control panel (which makes managing a server an absolute breeze), and also 24/7 availability.
- You don’t need to use your computer to run the server
If you’re running a Minecraft server on your computer, you’re essentially giving the server a portion of your precious computing resources (mostly RAM). Whilst this might be okay for people with insanely powerful computers. For the average user, Google Chrome alone is already taking up 50% of what’s left – leaving very little available resources to play Minecraft. This is most likely one of the biggest reasons you would opt to use a hosting provider.
Don’t forget, it might not just be yourself joining the Minecraft server. If you’re inviting your friends too, each one of them is going to be eating up a share of your computer’s resources. With your friends joining onto your self hosted world, you can no longer just shut down your PC – because if you do, everyone will get booted from the game, and your friends who are walking across the Nether aren’t going to be overly friendly after that. This takes us nicely onto the second reason. - The server will run 24/7
We’ve all been there, either the one asking the question, or the one receiving the question. “Can you turn your PC on so I can play Minecraft”
This is such a frustrating problem to have when hosting a Minecraft server on your computer. In the modern world, people are friends with people on the other side of the planet, making it pretty hard to arrange any sort of game night where everyone is online at the same time, and even if you get half the gaming crew together, without the owner’s PC, that gaming night is not going to happen. Unless you fancy spending your time zipping and sharing all sorts of random versions of the world using Discord, emails or WeTransfer – eww.
The glorious nature of a hosting provider is that they’ll be hosting your server 24/7, 365 days a year. No matter who is online or who wants to join the world, the server will be online and available. Fancy a quick spot of farming during lunch break when “working from home”, or a late night binge at obscure times? The server won’t judge you. - Your files and world files are safer
Picture this, you’ve got a beautiful world, efficient farms, magnificent structures and more Netherite than you could ever need, sounds nice…until you update your computer and Windows 11 corrupts your world, or any reason for that matter. Your Minecraft world is sensitive, and the smallest of file changes could corrupt your entire world. Check out what happened on my world below – we had an item id corruption, which led to chunks going missing, trees turning into icy doors, biomes merging at weird points…it was chaos, and we almost lost hundreds of hours of extreme modded machines
With a hosting provider, you are usually going to get full server backups as part of your plan. That way, should the worst happen, you can easily roll it back to an earlier restore point. - Your internet doesn’t need to handle many players
Not everyone gets to enjoy the pleasure of 1gbps internet, in fact, I suffer from sub 50mbps at home, so anything more than a couple devices streaming Netflix will cripple my Wi-Fi. By using a hosting provider, they’ll handle all of the networking needs, and ensure there’s enough bandwidth for everyone. Unlike home broadband, the network used by hosting providers is very resilient and built to handle significant load with ease – not to mention the many precautions and backup network lines that sit within the data centers to prevent any outage. You’ll be able to play Minecraft and know that your regular 10pm network dropout won’t cause any problems with your friends.
With that, you can also have some confidence that your server network is secured, and you’re not opening up your home router to the public, which can invite some really unwanted guests. - Access to technical support
It’s going to happen at some point, your server will have some weird and funky errors and you’ll be spending hours crawling Java forums to debug errors, or you’ll be rewording the same question to Gemini or Chat-GPT with no actual answer that can get you what you need.
The beauty of hosting services is that they have a team of technical engineers who are well versed in Minecraft and ready to help you – after all, it’s part of the service you paid for (well, that is for most hosting providers. Some do things a bit different, like removing personal support and only being able to speak with AI. Once again, eww.
Hosting providers generally have full access to your Minecraft server and will be able to log into it and provide assistance without needing to do anything on your computer. They usually also have a comprehensive knowledge base where you can find specific resources to your needs. - You will get some form of control panel
If you’re like me, you will appreciate this one. I much prefer a nice graphical interface, especially one that I can manage anywhere in the world. The ability to start a server from your phone, or send random commands to the chat whilst waiting for a bus just seems perfect.
One of the core principles of a hosting provider is for you to easily manage your Minecraft server – this is done by providing you the ability to upload your own world files, add mods, use commands etc. By far one of the best features of most panels is having the ability to easily change Java versions – something that can be very messy if done locally.
Simply put, you’ll get a panel with all the buttons you’ll ever need, available via a web page, accessible from anywhere. - You can scale your server up and down easily
We all have that one friend who takes redstone or RF too far and makes something with absolutely no purpose but to eat up as much server resources as possible. Or, someone is trying to build the world’s largest nuclear reactor – this is from experience…
If you or a friend does this, and your home computer starts running out of RAM, it’s going to cost quite a bit to upgrade your resources. This is what gives using a hosting provider an edge over running it locally – most hosting providers will give you the option to purchase more RAM (usually in small increments of 1-2 GB at a time) – this can work out much cheaper than buying more RAM to upgrade your PC. This is especially important when running huge server setups with hundreds of players and you need to scale up as your server grows. - No hardware costs
Running a PC 24/7 uses both electricity and also incurs wear onto your components (it might not sound like a lot, but if you’re planning on running a server for a year, this could mean a lot). Hosting providers take care of all of the components on the server, ranging from the network card, cooling, CPUs, RAM, the list goes on. Over time, some components may begin to error or show signs of failure – the hosting provider will handle all of this, and will fund the replacement of any faulty hardware. Hosting providers also ensure that their servers are running the required resources to operate Minecraft, which means you also never have to worry about replacing your RAM or CPU to get the best performance. - Global accessibility
There’s nothing more upsetting than your friend on the other side of the world suffering painful latency and fluctuating ping. Fighting Creepers is pretty destructive when they’re teleporting all around the place like an Enderman. Hosting providers host the servers within vast data centers with superfast global connection. Whilst ping will likely still be higher, the latency and stability will be significantly better and provide an all round more enjoyable experience.
Hosting providers will usually give you a choice of where in the world you can host your Minecraft server, this gives you the option to select the closest server to your main player base. - Collaborative management
You can finally tell your mod addicted friend to “do it yourself”. Instead of trying to screenshare on Discord and click around trying to find out what to do, hosting providers give you the ability to add more users to your management panel – I call this “delegation”.
This is even more powerful in scenarios where you have a large player base and need to have operators / admins to handle many of the day to day management tasks – such as updates, reboots, commands, backups etc. Users that are added to the management panel will be able to control the files, versions and investigate log files when errors occur. - Bonus point – you can plant a tree!
If you choose Cybrancee.com to host your Minecraft world, we’ll plant a tree with RippleAfrica.com. When you purchase any product with Cybrancee, we plant 1 tree in Malawi to help restore forests and rebuild nature reserves. Your server will be hosted within our carbon neutral data centers, and you’ll be doing extra good in the world – what’s not to love about that (and our prices are still lower than the rest!).
