Self-hosting vs a hosting provider: the honest maths
"I've got an old PC lying around, might as well use it." That's usually where it starts, and it isn't a bad idea in itself: self-hosting teaches you a lot about running a server. The maths changes, though, the moment other people rely on the server being up when they log in.
What a machine at home actually costs
A desktop PC running around the clock draws somewhere between 60 and 120 W depending on its age and load. Over a month that's 45 to 90 kWh. At typical European electricity rates, the power bill alone already exceeds the price of an entry-level hosting plan — before counting the hardware itself, its wear, and the noise in the room.
Three constraints come on top, and none of them show up on a bill:
- The home router. A server exposed from home goes through the household's router. All upload bandwidth is shared with everyone else in the house, and consumer connections offer far less upstream than downstream.
- Dynamic IP addresses. Most consumer subscriptions rotate their IP address periodically. Without a dynamic DNS service, the address you gave your players stops working without warning.
- Port forwarding. Opening port 25565 on your router means exposing your home network. A misconfigured Minecraft server becomes a way into the other devices in the house.
The availability you give up
A power cut, a router firmware update, a house move, someone unplugging the power strip: each of these takes the server down. That doesn't matter for a single-player world. It does matter for a community that meets at 9 pm.
It's also why a status page has to live somewhere other than the infrastructure it monitors — something we go into in this article.
When self-hosting is still the right call
For learning, for testing a modpack before deploying it, or for two people playing on a local network. No reason to pay for that. The switch usually happens when one of these three sentences becomes true: "people are waiting for the server to be online", "I don't want an open port on my router any more", "I want to be able to go on holiday".
What a host changes
A machine dedicated to the job, a stable address, automatic backups, and a panel to drive it all without touching a command line. Our plans start at €1.99/month for 1.5 GB of RAM, with a refund available within 48 hours of ordering, no justification required.
If you're unsure which size to pick, the article on RAM sizing starts from your expected player count, and explains why "more" isn't always "better".