How Much Does a Minecraft Server Cost?

At CraftLands a Minecraft server is €2.50 per GB of RAM per month, so 4 GB is €10, 8 GB is €20 and 16 GB is €40. Across the market a small vanilla server runs roughly €3 to €12 a month, and a modded server for a group of ten lands between €15 and €30. There is no setup fee and no separate charge for mod support, backups or DDoS protection.

RAM is the number almost every host bills on, and it is driven by two things: the player count and how heavy your mods are. Vanilla with five friends fits the 4 GB entry tier. A mid-weight modpack with the same five people wants 6 to 8 GB. What you should also check is what the RAM sits on, because a cheap 8 GB plan on an old Xeon with shared storage will feel worse than a smaller plan on a high-clock CPU with NVMe.

A rough guide at €2.50/GB: 4 GB (€10) is the entry tier and suits vanilla or a light plugin server for a small group; 6 GB (€15) covers around ten players on vanilla, or a small modpack; 8 GB (€20) is the comfortable floor for most CurseForge packs with a group of ten; 12 to 16 GB (€30 to €40) is for kitchen-sink packs or a community server with thirty-plus players. Guessing high costs a few euros; guessing low costs you the evening.

Free hosting is genuinely useful for testing an idea or a weekend world, and it comes with real trade-offs: queues before the server boots, a sleep timer when nobody is connected, hard caps on mods and world size, and no guarantee the world survives. If the server is something people are building on week after week, the €10 to €20 a month is buying persistence and support rather than raw hardware.

Not for the mods themselves, at least not here. Modded servers cost more only because they need more RAM and benefit from a faster CPU. Minecraft ticks its world on a single thread and mods add work to that same thread, so clock speed does more for a modded server than extra cores. Some hosts charge a premium on top for modpack support, which is worth checking before you compare two prices side by side.

Usually, and here they are: quarterly, semi-annual and annual billing each carry a discount against the monthly rate. The trade-off is committing before you know how the server settles. Starting monthly and switching to annual once the world has stuck is the cheaper mistake to make.

Setup fees, charges for extra backups, paying per additional server slot, add-on fees for a dedicated IP or a modpack installer, and renewal pricing that is higher than the advertised first-term rate. Ask what the price is in month thirteen, not month one. CraftLands has no setup fee, includes backups and DDoS protection on every plan, and prices every tier from the same standard €2.50 per GB.

It crosses over somewhere around 32 GB. Below that, a managed game server is cheaper once you account for the panel, backups and support you would otherwise run yourself. Above it, or if you want to run several large servers on one machine, bare metal starts to win on price per GB, at the cost of doing your own administration.

Yes, in both directions, from the panel and at any time. Billing is prorated, so upgrading mid-month does not mean paying twice. That is the reason to start at the tier that matches your group today rather than the one you might need in six months.

Game servers come with a 3-day money-back guarantee, so you can measure real performance with your actual pack and your actual players before committing.