Clay Berndt

Hosting your own Minecraft server means the world your friends play in runs on hardware you control: no slot caps, no plugin restrictions, no per-player pricing. This guide walks the path on a Linux VPS or dedicated server, from sizing the machine and choosing between vanilla, Paper, Fabric and NeoForge to installing Java 25 and writing a systemd unit that survives reboots. It also covers JVM sizing with Aikar's flags, the firewall rule and SRV record that let players in, whitelisting, backups, safe updating, and Bedrock crossplay through Geyser and Floodgate.

The three big media servers used to differ mainly in polish. After Plex's 2025–2026 pricing changes (remote streaming behind a paywall, the lifetime pass at $749.99) the differences are now philosophical: fully free and open, freemium-with-account, or quietly commercial. This comparison lays out what's actually paywalled where, the remote-access and privacy models, honest transcoding hardware guidance for server deployments, and a verdict by user type.

RAID decides two things about your server before it ever boots: how much of the storage you're paying for is usable, and what happens at the moment a drive dies. Neither decision is reversible without rebuilding the array, so it's worth getting right at order time. This guide explains the four levels that matter in practice (0, 1, 5, and 10) plus ZFS's take on the same ideas, with honest guidance on rebuild risk, what RAID does not protect against, and which level fits which workload.

Most server sizing goes wrong in one of two directions: paying for cores that idle at 3% for a year, or discovering at launch that the database's hot set doesn't fit in RAM. Both mistakes come from skipping the same step: sizing from the workload instead of from a price list. This guide gives you the method (baseline, headroom, growth), the per-workload heuristics for CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth, and the honest answer to when you should scale up versus out.

A game server is a single-threaded simulation loop on a fixed clock, so it lives or dies on per-core speed and steady timing, not core count. A shared VPS puts a hypervisor's scheduler between that loop and the CPU, and the jitter shows up as missed ticks. Bare metal removes the layer. This pillar covers bare metal against a VPS and managed game panels, why clocks beat cores, real RAM figures for Minecraft, Rust, ARK, Palworld, Valheim and CS2, storage and DDoS reality, running Pterodactyl or its Pelican fork yourself, and the honest cases where a VPS is still the right call.

Ping is only part of what a player feels. A single round trip runs through input sampling, the last mile, transit and peering, a queue on the server, and the wait for the next simulation tick before the world reacts at all. This guide breaks down where felt delay actually comes from, how tick rate and netcode change the picture, why jitter and packet loss hurt more than a stable higher ping, and the one lever a host controls most: putting the server close to players on hardware that holds its tick rate.

Bare metal wins on the two numbers that decide whether a game server feels good: worst-case tick time and worst-case latency. A single-tenant VM on hardware you control gets close. An oversold multi-tenant VPS is where fixed-tick simulation falls apart, because a vCPU scheduled a few milliseconds late is a missed tick every player sees as rubber-banding. This guide covers what a hypervisor adds to a tick loop, why the 95th-percentile tick time matters more than average throughput, how to measure steal time and MSPT on your own server, and when a VM is still the right call.

A Windows dedicated server gives you a whole physical machine running Windows Server directly on the hardware, but which version and edition should you run on it? Windows Server 2019, 2022, and 2025 sit at different points on the support timeline, and Standard versus Datacenter changes what you can do with virtualisation. This guide explains what a bare-metal Windows server actually is, when it beats a VPS or cloud instance, and how to pick a version and edition by workload, support window, and licensing, with a side-by-side comparison and links to the right server.