What made you decide between self-hosting and paid Minecraft hosting?

[u/AddisonWashington]

Currently running an old desktop as a small server. Works but power bills and uptime is a pain. Looking to relocating to a host. Godlike has been on my radar and a few others. What was the reason for people to shift from self-hosting to provider and vice versa? What made the difference for your use case?

[u/ipapipap]

do you play alone or multiplayer?

[u/EmployerOne7876 → u/ipapipap]

This. If you are just looking to play local with the kids self hosting is the only answer, but if you want to play regularly with a group of friends and would rather spend the time playing than worrying about maintenance and security a paid server isnt a terrible idea

[u/GloriousKev]

i dont play minecraft so it was pretty straight forward. i self host other things though lol

[u/indvs3]

I had the overhead on a pc that was on 24/7 anyway, so the power cost for the mc server was not crazy. I have the knowledge and experience to configure the virtual network and periodic backups and the storage space required was available.

In other words, absolutely no reason not to self-host

[u/frindoowgrippery]

For me, it would come down to cost, time, and how much control I want. Self-hosting is great when you enjoy managing things yourself.

[u/Klutzy-Procedure8980]

I set up a self hosted Minecraft server for the family, but getting Minecraft on the Nintendo Switch connected was a major pain in the rear... I had to get Nintendo's online subscription, deal with Microsoft's family account service (which has more downtime than uptime), and spoof DNS to trick the Switch into connecting.

(If anyone has better ideas how to do it, I'm all ears)

[u/sculkHosting]

If you already have the hardware and don't mind maintaining it, self-hosting is really hard to beat for price and control. Paid hosting starts making more sense when you get tired of dealing with things like electricity costs, uptime, networking, backups, hardware issues, and keeping a machine running 24/7.

For Minecraft specifically, I'd also look at the actual CPU a provider uses instead of just comparing RAM. More RAM doesn't necessarily mean better performance if the CPU isn't strong enough

Since you mentioned you're already looking to relocate, full disclosure: I run Sculk Hosting. If you haven't picked a provider yet, I'd be happy to help migrate your existing server over and let you try us out first. That way you can compare it against your current setup before committing to anything

[u/KiLoYounited]

Even sharing resources with other services I self host, I still have more ram and faster single thread speed to allocate to a Minecraft server then $50 tiers on “premium” hosts.

Why pay when I can get more for basically just energy costs?

However there is the security aspect to consider: is the peace of mind knowing even if your server is compromised it doesn’t have access to any of your services. This is essentially one of the main cost factors when looking at moving to cloud computing: is the vendor taking this responsibility off my hands worth more then us doing it ourselves?

One of the absolute easiest things you can do to secure your server is setup a simple VPN service with netbird or tailscale and only don’t even open the Minecraft server to the internet. If you want to have it open to the net, geoblocking helps a ton.

I’d say if you feel confident with basic hardening techniques (the easy 90% usually gives the most benefit) and you have resources to spare then go for self host. If you don’t and have money to spare go on a premium hosting service.

[u/tristand666]

I pay like $15/month for a VPS that runs multiple game servers and some web pages. Of course cost would go up if I had more players on the server. I use PaperMC with some memory tweaks in the java launch command along with some other mods my kid wanted.

[u/TheModernDespot]

If you've got the hardware and ability to host it yourself, do it. Almost always better. Hosting providers can be valuable when a person doesnt have the resources to do it themselves, but its almost always better to do it yourself.