Running a Minecraft server for a club or a class
Setting up a server for a group you supervise — a club, a class, an association — is not the same as setting one up among friends. The technical constraints are identical, but everything else changes: who has access to what, who fixes it when it breaks, and what happens when somebody destroys other people's work.
Sizing for a group that doesn't all play at once
Twenty sign-ups don't mean twenty simultaneous players. What counts is the peak, not the roster: a club of twenty where eight connect on Wednesday afternoon is sized for eight.
Our sizing rule starts from simultaneous players for exactly that reason. When in doubt, start small: moving up a plan takes minutes, whereas six months of unused RAM is money you don't get back.
Never share the main password
It's the most common mistake and the most expensive. The main account can do everything, including delete the server. The panel lets you create sub-users with limited rights: someone can restart the server and read the console without being able to touch files or backups.
In practice, give one or two co-supervisors the right to restart and keep the rest to yourself. The steps are in the getting-started documentation.
Griefing isn't a question of trust
In a supervised group, destruction is rarely malicious: usually it's clumsiness, a badly placed TNT, spilled lava. The result is the same, and two precautions are enough to keep it from becoming a disaster.
- Backups you have already tested. A backup you've never restored is a hypothesis, not a safety net — our article on restoring a world covers the procedure, and the right time to try it is now, not afterwards.
- A land-protection plugin. It lets you define what each person may modify, settling the question before it arises: see anti-grief plugins.
The question of minors
If the group is made up of minors, two points are worth settling before opening: whether the server is open to outsiders or restricted to the group (a whitelist settles that in one command), and whether legal guardians know about the activity. These are supervision questions rather than technical ones, but they're far easier to settle beforehand.
On billing, the subscription is in the name of whoever orders — think about who within the organisation should hold it.
Getting started
The server address is a subdomain you choose, something like
clubmc.rmdc.cloud: no port to remember, no IP to copy onto a whiteboard. It's
a small thing, and it's the one that matters when you have to give the address to twenty
people at once.