Renting a Minecraft server: which plan for 10, 20, 50 or 100 players

How much RAM does a Minecraft server need for 20 players, and which plan fits? The answer comes in three parts: a rule of thumb based on the player count, an extra allowance depending on the server type (Vanilla, Paper with plugins, modpack, Bedrock) and a look at the other figures that count alongside RAM. The matching plans at KernelHost: MC-1 with 2 GB for €4.00, MC-2 with 4 GB for €10.00, MC-3 with 8 GB for €20.00 and the MC-Configurator with 1 to 32 GB from €4.00 per month.

Why RAM is the most important figure, but not the only one

RAM decides how much of the world may be loaded at the same time: chunks, entities, inventories, plugin data. If it is too tight, garbage collection runs non-stop, tick times go up, and at some point the process ends with OutOfMemoryError. RAM is the only figure that can be derived directly from the player count. Three others decide whether that memory is of any use at all.

The CPU, and specifically a single core. The world simulation runs in one thread: 20 ticks per second with a budget of 50 milliseconds each, handled by exactly one core. More RAM does not move that limit. Rule of thumb: from roughly 50 players on one instance onwards, single-core performance decides whether the 20 ticks hold, not memory. The Minecraft plans run on Intel Xeon E5 and AMD EPYC processors.

NVMe storage. Every chunk a player walks into is read from disk, and every autosave round writes hundreds of regions back; on slow drives that is exactly where the stutter every five minutes comes from. All the plans listed here run on datacenter NVMe in RAID-1 or RAID-10.

Connectivity and location. The bandwidth requirement is modest, as a rule of thumb a few tens up to a few hundred kilobytes per second per player; even 100 players stay below 200 Mbps on a 2x 1 Gbps uplink. Latency matters more: the servers sit in the maincubes datacenter in Frankfurt am Main, operated by KernelHost GmbH with its head office in Vienna, with pings from central Europe in the low double-digit millisecond range.

Rules of thumb: RAM and plan by player count

The table is a rule of thumb, not a measurement. It assumes view distance 8, a pre-generated world and a community without industrial-scale redstone contraptions. The figures state the RAM you should book, not the Java heap.

With modpacks the requirement scales almost entirely with the number of mods: a light pack with up to 100 mods gets by on 6 to 8 GB, a heavy one with more than 300 mods needs 16 GB and up, no matter whether 5 or 20 people are playing. Bedrock on a Nukkit base is usually less demanding than the Java Edition, and the figures there are deliberately conservative. Above roughly 12 GB of heap, more memory only lengthens the garbage collection pauses; if you need more than that, split the load across several instances.

Every Minecraft plan comes with unlimited slots, the standard port 25565, provisioning in about 30 seconds after payment and 3.2 Tbps Arbor DDoS protection; billing is PrePaid with no minimum term, and moving up to more RAM keeps your world. When in doubt, start one size smaller and add capacity as soon as the used heap stays above 70% of -Xmx after a full garbage collection (spark healthreport --memory) or OutOfMemoryError shows up in the log.

Setting the Java heap correctly

The RAM in your plan and the Java heap are not the same thing: besides the heap (-Xmx) the JVM needs metaspace, thread stacks, Netty buffers and code cache. Enter the full amount as -Xmx and you no longer get a heap error, you get a process that is killed at the memory limit without any warning. Rule of thumb: set the heap to 75% to 85% of the RAM in your plan, so -Xmx1536M on 2 GB, -Xmx3G on 4 GB, -Xmx6G on 8 GB, -Xmx12G on 16 GB; with modpacks stay closer to 75%, and on a VPS reserve at least another 512 MB for the operating system.

Set -Xms equal to -Xmx so the heap does not grow and shrink while the server runs, because every resize costs a full garbage collection. For Paper and Purpur the Aikar flags have proven themselves: the G1 collector (-XX:+UseG1GC), a pause target of 200 milliseconds, a tuned young generation and -XX:+AlwaysPreTouch. The complete line, including the adjustments from 12 GB of heap upwards, is in Fixing Java heap space on a Minecraft server. In the game panel the flags belong in the start command, on a VPS in the start script or the systemd unit.

View distance, chunks and entities

The number of loaded chunks per player grows quadratically with the view distance: 441 at view-distance=10, 289 at 8, 169 at 6. Ten players spread across the map keep a good 4,400 chunks in memory at view distance 10, ten players at spawn barely more than 441. View distance 8 together with simulation-distance=5 is a good starting point for survival servers with 10 to 30 players. Pre-generate the world up to the world border with Chunky before you open the doors: creating a new chunk puts load on the main thread, loading a finished one hardly does. And keep entities in check, because a breeding pen with 300 animals or a mob farm with thousands of item stacks costs you every single tick, whether anyone is watching or not. Measurement and countermeasures are covered in Minecraft server lag: finding and fixing the causes.

What the game panel takes off your hands, and what it does not

The game panel handles the installation of the server software with one click (Vanilla, Spigot, Paper, Purpur, Forge, Fabric, BungeeCord and a selection of modpacks), version switches, start, stop and restart, the live console, a file manager with editor, FTP access for your own worlds and plugins, and the automatic backups; you edit server.properties and the JVM flags right there. Bedrock servers on a Nukkit base are available as well, on the standard port 19132.

What it cannot take off your hands are the decisions in this article: sizing, view distance, picking and maintaining plugins, pre-generation, entities and backing up before risky changes. Create a manual backup before every version switch and every plugin update, independently of the automatic cycle. The whitelist, permissions and operator rights stay with you as well.

DDoS protection is not an optional extra on a public server

As soon as a server appears in a server list or its address does the rounds in a Discord, it gets attacked, usually for no particular reason; attacks can be rented as a service, and Minecraft is a preferred target because it is everywhere. Next to volumetric attacks there are protocol-level attacks such as Nullping and handshake floods, which overload the server process with very little bandwidth. The only thing that helps against either is filtering inside the network in front of the server; a plugin sees the packets only once they have already arrived.

At KernelHost the 3.2 Tbps Arbor DDoS protection is included in every Minecraft plan and every KVM VPS, at no surcharge and with nothing to activate. It filters in real time, is tuned to gaming traffic and covers the Java Edition on port 25565 (TCP) as well as Bedrock on port 19132 (UDP). The Minecraft-specific patterns are described in Minecraft DDoS protection and Nullping protection, and the overview is on DDoS protection. Do not budget a separate line item for protection, but do plan for a whitelist as long as the server is not meant to be public.

When a VPS or Professional VDS makes sense

A Minecraft plan is exactly one instance on one port, and that is enough for most projects up to 100 players. A server of your own starts to make sense as soon as you run several worlds as separate instances behind a proxy such as Velocity or BungeeCord, need your own database for LuckPerms, CoreProtect or an economy plugin plus Redis for the proxy, want to open additional ports for a web map such as BlueMap or for cross-play through Geyser, or need root access, your own Java versions and cron jobs.

Budget the heap plus 1 to 1.5 GB for the JVM per instance there, another 1 GB for the operating system and one core per busy instance plus one for the proxy and the system. A KVM VPS comes with 2 to 32 GB of RAM and 1 to 8 AMD EPYC cores for €9.99 to €49.99 per month: the tier with 16 GB and 4 cores (€24.99) carries the proxy, two instances with 4 GB of heap each and a database, the tier with 32 GB and 8 cores (€49.99) carries four instances with 4 to 5 GB of heap. If one instance permanently needs the full performance of a core, or the network keeps growing, the Professional VDS with 48 to 128 GB of RAM and 10 to 24 dedicated EPYC cores (€59.99 to €149.99) is the tier that fits; the entry size with 48 GB carries the proxy, five instances with 6 GB of heap each and the database. Both sit in the same datacenter in Frankfurt am Main and are provisioned in about 30 seconds; installation, updates and backups are your job there.

Conclusion: plan recommendation by player count

• Up to 5 players, Vanilla, Paper without plugins or Bedrock: MC-1 with 2 GB for €4.00, with plugins MC-2.
• 10 players: MC-2 with 4 GB for €10.00, even with 10 to 20 plugins.
• 20 players: MC-2 with few plugins, otherwise the configurator with 6 GB; modpack 10 to 12 GB.
• 50 players: MC-3 with 8 GB for €20.00, with a large plugin suite the configurator with 10 GB; modpack 12 to 16 GB.
• 100 players: the configurator with 12 to 16 GB, view distance 6 to 8, a pre-generated world; from here on the CPU is the yardstick.
• A network with a proxy and several instances: KVM VPS from 16 GB (€24.99) or Professional VDS from 48 GB (€59.99).

When in doubt, book the smaller tier: PrePaid with no minimum term, provisioning in about 30 seconds, and an upgrade keeps your world. You will find all plans and the configurator on Rent a Minecraft server.