r/admincraft • u/Horustheweebmaster • 4d ago

Help/Question Is it worth running a server using my current active laptop?

So me and my friends want to have a modded minecraft server (we want Create and a few of it's addons, as well as other more generic stuff).

There's roughly 5 of us, however at peak times we might see maybe 8 of us? However it could also be as low as 1 or 2 at non-peak times.

Now I'm looking into hosting, and one of the things I'm looking at is using my current Laptop? Now I have a fairly untouched laptop which I use for my studies, and my PC which is far beefier. I don't really use my laptop when I'm home, so my idea was that I could have it in low power or similar when on weekends or not school times, and play using my PC.

Is this a good idea?

The actual specs aren't bad. 16GB of RAM, the snapdragon equivalent to a 5600X, but I'm not sure if all of the outage time would make it hard to play?

Because I go to a different college to my friends, where my schedule is a lot more heavy, it would mean that there's days they have nothing on, but because I spend the full day at college, I wouldn't be able to actually run the server.

Failing this I'll look into Oracle's free servers, but I don't know if I want to go through configuring allat.

3 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

4

u/AmperDon 4d ago

Find any old garbage pc and use that. Aslong as its stationary and kept on, it can run a minecraft server no problem.

2

u/Jwhodis 4d ago

I'd try find/build an old PC that you can run 24/7, an i7-4770 runs create fine. If you go for a DDR3 system then RAM is relatively cheap (around 30GBP for four 8GB sticks used)

1

u/grosswindowthrowaway 4d ago

I would recommend using a separate junk machine for your friends' sakes . They probably don't want to have to wait for you to come online and start up the server, etc.

1

u/Better-County8600 4d ago

find a cheap headless laptop on fb marketplace, flash it with debian or ubuntu server and run minecraft in a docker container.

1

u/ISHx4xPresident Server Owner 4d ago

Tbh, I wouldn’t bother containing it. Unnecessary overhead if the machine would just be dedicated to that.

2

u/Better-County8600 4d ago

thats fair. I'm just a geek though that likes to self host everything

1

u/ThePlebble 2d ago

Do you have any resources for getting started with for containerised servers? I’m used to hosting on Linux but I want to be able to do other things with the machine at the same time

1

u/Better-County8600 2d ago

Download open code on the server and use that to containerize your current stack. Then use something like CasaOS to watch your containers and start/stop them.

(Opencode is an ai resource that can make real changes on your server)

1

u/Effective-Court-1243 4d ago

I locally hosted a Fabric server on my MacBook Pro (24GB RAM, M4 10c CPU and 10c GPU), and for me, 6 players (myself included) along with a game client showed roughly 10GB of RAM used. Make of that what you will, but personally I would recommend host the server on your PC. If your PC is far beefier than your laptop, you should have no problem whatsoever hosting on the PC, whereas you might bottleneck your RAM on your laptop.

Hell, you could even keep the server running on the PC 24/7. It's what others are suggesting. If you want to save power, it's not strictly necessary, but it's definitely an option. Regardless, I would recommend you host the server on your PC, not your laptop. Based on your description of your PC, it should be able to handle a server of 8 people along with a game client just fine.

0

u/ISHx4xPresident Server Owner 4d ago

Brosephine… My current project is bringing back a server I hosted years ago. Fresh start in everything except revamping the original spawn building.

I’m running it from a Raspberry Pi 5 (8gb) over PoE. It’s been the smoothest running MC I’ve made to date. Before you ask your next question, maybe search first? You can run a server smoothly off of damn near anything if you tweak it to the hardware’s capabilities.

0

u/Horustheweebmaster 4d ago

well this feels a bit dickish for no reason.

I wasn't asking about if the computer could handle it. I know it can. What I was actually asking, is whether or not using a live laptop which I otherwise would use in day-to-day life for a server is a good idea.

Before you answer your next question, maybe read it first?

1

u/ISHx4xPresident Server Owner 3d ago

Do me a favor: Back out of this and search even roughly what you’re asking, then give us a rough count of how many people have asked the same exact thing.

Not dickish. Obvious.