Why a free server shuts down, and yours doesn't
You leave the server, your friends disconnect, and ten minutes later somebody has to wake it up and sit in a queue. That isn't a fault: it's the business model, and it makes perfect sense once you look at the numbers.
The problem shutting down solves
A Minecraft server holds its memory permanently, whether zero players or ten are online. That's the decisive point: RAM isn't shared the way CPU is. A machine running a thousand free servers continuously would have to buy memory for all thousand, all the time — for no revenue at all.
Shutting idle servers down is what makes the sums work: at any moment only a fraction are being played. It's what lets those offers exist, and it's honest of them to do it rather than sell an illusion.
What it changes once you actually play
The consequences go beyond the wait at startup:
- Farms stop. Anything that produces continuously — furnace, mob farm, machine — produces nothing while the server sleeps.
- Whoever arrives first waits for everyone. They start the server, queue, load the world. On a heavy modpack that's measured in minutes.
- Nobody can drop in spontaneously. A friend connecting at 11pm finds the door shut unless you're there to wake it.
- Backups are often limited in number or retention, which becomes a real problem the day somebody does something silly.
When free is the right call
To be clear: for trying a modpack over a weekend, for a game with nothing at stake, for finding out whether a shared server is even an idea your group will stick with — free does the job perfectly, and paying would be daft.
When it stops being
The tipping point is always the same: when you start building something you want to come back to. From then on a sleeping server is constant friction, and the real cost is measured in ruined evenings rather than euros — about €2.50 per person per month for a group of four.
With us
Our servers don't shut down when you disconnect: they run continuously, and the address stays reachable at any hour. That's precisely what you're paying for, and it's the one difference between a free offer and a paid one that genuinely matters.