Self-Hosted Minecraft Servers v.s. Externally Hosted Servers
Are you considering setting up a Minecraft Server? If so, you are probably wondering if you should run it at home or pay a hosting service monthly to host it for you. We will list the benefits, and downsides of each.
Since at home pricing appears to be free on the surface, this is what most consider first. The usability of this hosting is dependent on your hosting experience, time commitment, and resources. While there are many tutorials that explain how to set up a Minecraft Server, doing so properly can be quite complicated. This is especially the case if you want it to work outside of your home, to host other family and friends. If this is the case, after you manage to set up the server, you must then port forward, secure it with firewalls, and protect with DDoS protection services like Cloudflare. You must be able to manage and set this all up yourself, where failure to do so could result in your internet connection being temporarily compromised through DDoS attacks. Learn more about DDoS attacks on our website. All this setup and management means that hosting a server at home will be very time expensive, especially considering the complete lack of support. Your resources must also be reliable and cheap, generally homes lack the infrastructure to prevent power loss to your server, and the extremely high bandwidth (Cube Hosting servers operate in data centers with 200+ Gigabit uplinks).
This free hosting might not be as free as you think. The power consumption of your server running all day, depending on where you live could be extremely expensive. This combined with the high price of premium internet plans could cost you a lot more money than a hosting company would.
At home hosting also brings up many security concerns, where DDoS attacks can bring down your entire home network, or your address could be released to the public. While so far at home hosting appears to be quite flawed, the pros of such hosting can sometimes outweigh the cons. Hosting a server at your house means that you get to pick the hardware, and the limitations that come along with it. If you want to host your own large, and powerful server with hardware you select, at home hosting is the way to go. Your server can use whatever RAM, CPU, or storage you wish. You also get full OS access, meaning you can easily add a service such as a web server, or secondary server easily further down the line. Hosting a server at your house, means you will have remarkably low ping time, which is very desirable.
In conclusion, for at home servers to be tangible you must live in the correct area where power and internet is very cheap, have a lot of experience, and have a lot of free time. This will, however, give you the benefits of full hardware, and operating system access.
Much like hosting a server at your house, paying a hosting company to host a server for you comes with both positives, and downsides. If you like to have full control of your server, such as the hardware it uses, or the operating system your server runs on, this is impossible to do through a hosting company. Most Minecraft hosting providers do allow FTP or SFTP access, however, this is not close to the same level of customizability. Using a hosting company means you must make monthly payments to have it run, and if you already have hardware, internet, and free power, hosing services can cost more than self hosted servers.
Hosting companies do, however, provide many benefits. It is quite often for hosting providers to have excellent backup power, and redundant internet connections like we do at Cube Hosting. This will give your server the extremely reliable uptime needed to build a great community. If there is ever downtime, you won’t have to worry, the host will solve it for you. Server hosts also give great support, and will assist you in changing between mod packs, plugins, and server .jar files. This is great if this is your first time setting up a Minecraft Server. Due to the large volumes of servers that are hosted, hosting companies like Cube Hosting, have powerful DDoS protection services offered for free. Plus, if an attack gets through, only your server will be shut down and not your entire home internet connection. Setting up an externally hosted server, takes little to no effort at all. Servers are set up in minutes and are ready to operate to their full potential immediately where very little time is required on the user’s part.
I hope this article is helpful with your decision between hosting a Minecraft Server at your home, or paying for it to be hosted externally. If you do decide to host your server externally, Cube Hosting provides great Minecraft Hosting at very low prices. Currently, there is a sale of 50% off all services for the first month using code: 50OFF!
