Interesting!

What I wonder is: given how inefficient Minecraft is (in general), how can you have healthy tech margins when a single server can take up many hundreds of megs of memory (and chew through a respectable allotment of CPU time)? As I recall, this grows linearly with each player added.

Yep, in fact the server's memory usage grows the further each player is away from each other :)

We are doing Heroku-style spinning up and spinning servers on demand. We only pay for however much you play.

Chris and Dave have done it. If your non-geek mates play Minecraft, they'll do well with Minefold. They'll come for the ease of setup and stay for the support.

Awesome stuff, about time someone built this!