Memory has never been a problem for MC servers. Speaking as someone who's personally been involved in some of the larger servers --

Pain point has always been CPU usage on a single threaded level. Nowadays servers are optimized to the point where we squeeze all of the performance out of the CPU and run multiple instances of MC in order to accomplish that on a multi-threaded level. You can easily hold 500 players concurrent with zero lag on as little as 16GB of RAM and an E3v3 processor. You might say this is a lot of resources, but compare it with other FPS games and how many players they hold on single instances, and you'll realize Minecraft is in it's own league.

Also, due to how much CPU is a bottleneck for MC, Cloud providers are avoided at all costs. 2.2ghz (AWS) is not acceptable at all for the use case.

Minecraft servers are extremely optimized nowadays -- I have no clue where the rumor started that Java was the pain point.

My point is 16GB of memory isn't a whole lot if you've already got server hardware and a place to host it, that's really low-end these days, but it's a small fortune if you need to pony up $5-10/GB. per month for hosting services.

I've been able to host Minecraft instances on my own hardware over a cable modem feed, and on a VM provisioned within a machine I fully control, but it's just not economical to do cloud-wise.

I do miss the days when the server component of a multi-player game was pretty lean and non-intrusive so you could run it as a background process on pretty much anything that had good bandwidth.

Perhaps you use a cloud VPS provider that over-provisions customers.

Until recently, I ran a Minecraft server on a $10/month DigitalOcean Linux VPS. (I consider $10/month dirt cheap.)

It ran very smooth. No lag or performance hiccups.

hi buddy

I imagine most people interested in hosting their own minecraft server has some old laptop or desktop lying around. It's a very inexpensive hobby to just install linux on them and run a minecraft server there.

If the power bill is a concern, the computer wouldn't even have to be on 24/7; if it's just a server you and friends play on, it would be perfectly acceptable to just boot the computer whenever you want to play together.

I looked at using a droplet on DigitalOcean, it worked fine but there's quite a lot to consider in running a server. You can keep an image of the droplet and just boot when required. By that point my kids had moved on to Robocraft, and now Garrys Mod, and so it wasn't worth me maintaining a server for the occasional use it was getting.

Yeah, most likely. It says it supports Bukkit and Sponge plugins, both of which are built in Java (dunno much about Sponge, but Bukkit plugins are literally just .JAR files)

This was the original reason for the language choice: native compatibility with Bukkit plugins.

Have you ever played Minecraft on a server without mods? It’s impossible to administer past 5 people. For that using realms is an alternative . Every other server needs mods to function.

You may not have paused to consider that an open source minecraft server is free to implement a better administration system.

It is not necessary to have mod compatibility in order to provide an extensible, powerful alternative.

I'd love to play with the code of a C/C++ Minecraft server. Is there any yet?

Someone else just linked to this: https://cuberite.org/

$10 per GB? That’s insane -- basically what high end DDR4 costs upfront.

It's basically what Digital Ocean's droplets cost: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

$5/mo for 0.5G, $10/mo for 1G, $20/mo for 2G. All the standard droplets, except for the 3G for $15/mo one, make you pay $10 more per gigabyte.

Both Vultr and Linode seem to offer twice the amount of RAM per dollar though.

Digital Ocean do a really good value base VPS, but once you're spending $20/mo with them, there's much better options with more traditional VPS providers. They're priced to compete with an EC2 box, while not providing the value-add to go with it, IMO.

I have yet to find a better $/RAM value than Contabo. 7€/month for a dual core 6GB RAM VPS. And the value only gets better the higher you go: https://contabo.com/?show=vps

They just added a $15/mo 6G plan, though, which is mighty nice.

No, it's just 3G for $15/month, so that one particular plan takes $5 per gigabyte like Vultr and Linode.

That isn't to say it isn't a nice deal though.

Yes because buying a stick of memory from Best Buy is ALMOST the same thing as hosting a sever in a cloud data center with an slice of an entire computer, redundant power, redundant network, and administration baked in. It is soo insane that every time we have a post, and someone compares hosting a computer in their garage with AWS. This may be a new record though, comparing hosting with buying a stick of memory at best buy.

Yes, because when I'm hosting a server to play Minecraft with a few friends I need redundant power, network, and administration. It's not as if I could just go to Best Buy, buy another stick of RAM, shove it into my decently spec'd desktop, port forward to a self hosted server, and get 99% of my necessary performance for a tenth of the cost (over a year of operation). Plus I don't have to return the RAM to Best Buy after I'm done with it.

Because casually hosting a Minecraft server is ALMOST the same thing as hosting a SaaS which needs 5 nines of reliability.

Its not exactly a controversial statement that AWS carries a massive premium on stuff like RAM.

Great, and a airplane flight from Chicago to New York City caries a premium on the price of a gallon of gas. Please tell me how this means it is a reason to complain about the price of airline tickets?

Your analogies do nothing but confuse the issue, AWS is vastly more expensive that comparable connectivity and reundancy with colocated, dedicated or even virtualized instances in comparison to other providers, at all but the smallest scale, especially in terms of ram.

You are comparing apples to oranges. Look at the list of services you can spin up with 1 click at AWS. Now go to your little rent-a-server provider with a $49 a month server. Tell me how you add RDS / multi region LB / S3 / IoT / blah blah blah with 1 click to your $49 rent a server?

I don't even think you can get 16 GB of DDR4 for $160.

That's not unusual for small VMs, but at the point where you need a serious amount of RAM it's drastically cheaper to rent dedicated hardware.

You can get 32 or 64GB dedicated servers for around $80-110USD per month, so that is technically more economical, but that's a lot if you need to commit to that just to get a good deal per GB of memory.