A "4 GB Minecraft server" costs between nothing and forty euros a month, depending on where you look. The RAM is the same; what differs is everything around it.
What a host actually pays for
- Hardware: bought or rented, new or refurbished, and how many customers share one machine.
- Electricity and space: a data center rack costs money every month, a room with your own hardware costs power and internet.
- Network and DDoS protection: bandwidth is cheap, mitigation is not.
- IPv4 addresses: scarce; a dedicated IP per customer adds real cost.
- People: support, development, the person who gets up at 3 a.m. when a node dies.
- Software licences: many hosts pay for their control panel; open-source panels like Pterodactyl cost nothing.
- Payment fees and taxes: a few percent of every purchase.
Where the levels come from
Free hosts pay for all of that with ads, queues and shutdowns: your server stops when nobody is online, you wait to start it, and the hardware is shared as densely as possible. Good for testing; frustrating for a community.
Very cheap paid hosts (1-3 euros for 4 GB) usually oversell: the machine has less RAM and CPU than the sum of what was sold, on the bet that not everyone uses it at once. It works until Friday evening.
Mid-range (5-15 euros) is where dedicated RAM, NVMe storage, real DDoS mitigation and human support become normal. Differences here are mostly location, CPU speed and how much is included (backups, ports, databases).
Premium (20 euros and up) buys either the fastest consumer CPUs available, dedicated IPs, or a brand with a big support team. Whether that is worth it depends on whether you have 200 players or 10.
Our position
We are in the mid-range and the numbers are on the comparison page, dated and with the competitors' own prices. Our cost structure is unusual: own hardware, own solar power, a small team, no panel licence. That is where the price comes from, not from overselling. Day-based billing means you pay for 30, 90 or 365 days and not for a calendar month you might not use.
Questions that reveal the real price
- Is the RAM dedicated or "up to"?
- What CPU, and how many servers per machine?
- Are backups included, and how many?
- Where is the location, and what is my ping?
- What happens when I stop paying? Deleted after how many days?