TrueTick vs Aternos: free hosting vs never-oversold paid hosting

Aternos is how a huge number of people run a Minecraft server with friends — its homepage counter shows more than 140 million users. It's free, and starting a server is, in their words, "just as easy as pressing a button". For a lot of people it's exactly the right tool. TrueTick is a different thing: mostly paid and metered, with a small free tier, and every running server gets a CPU share that admission control reserves for it. This page is written by the paid host, so every claim about Aternos below links to their own site — check it before taking our word for anything.

Who each one is actually for

Aternos is for trying Minecraft with zero commitment. You and a couple of friends want to mess around for an evening, or you're not sure a long-running server is worth it yet. Free, and "There is no possibility to pay for anything". That's a genuinely good product for that job.

TrueTick is for a server you rely on. A weekly SMP with a real community, a modpack run you don't want held up by a queue, an event server where "it's not ready yet" isn't an option. We charge for that — by the hours the server is awake, not a flat monthly fee whether anyone logs in or not.

We have a free tier now too

Since this page first went up, we added a free tier of our own — worth knowing before you read the rest as a straight "free vs. paid" comparison. It isn't the same kind of free Aternos offers, and we'd rather spell out the difference than let the word "free" do more work than it should.

Aternos: unlimited hours, no promises about speed. There's no playtime limit: the server stays up as long as someone is playing. The trade-offs are ones Aternos states itself — a queue when their servers are full, ads that pay for it all, and "it's not possible to guarantee a lag-free experience, especially for a free service".

TrueTick free: capped hours, a reserved CPU share. 20 hours a month, 2 GB RAM, Paper, Purpur or Vanilla, one server per account, no card, no ads. While it's awake, its CPU share is reserved by the same admission control that guards paid servers. There's no queue — but the pool is small: when its CPU is all in use, a free server can't wake until another one sleeps, and the player is told to try again in a bit. How many free servers are open is shown live on the free page, with a waitlist when it's full.

Neither one is "more free" than the other — they're free in different ways. If unlimited hours with no monthly ceiling is what you need, that's Aternos, and we mean that (more below). If a smaller amount of free time on a reserved CPU share is closer to what you want, see if a server's open.

The comparison

A free service paid for by ads makes different trade-offs than a paid one. Checked September 2026 — every Aternos cell links to their own site:

	Aternos	TrueTick
Cost	Free — "There is no possibility to pay for anything"	Metered: $0.012 per active GB-hour, or flat $3/GB-month — or free: 20 h a month, 2 GB, a small pool
Paid for by	Ads — "completely financed through advertisements"	Paid plans; no ads
Starting a server	A queue when their servers are at full capacity; at the front you confirm with a click	No queue; if the node can't back the server's CPU share, the start is refused rather than queued
When it's empty	A countdown stops an empty server; to start it again you press Start on their site, or join through their Dawn launcher, which starts it for you	Sleeps when empty; a player connecting to its address wakes it, from any Java Edition launcher
Performance	"it's not possible to guarantee a lag-free experience, especially for a free service"	A reserved CPU share per running server; admission control won't overcommit a node
Tick metrics	TPS on the server page, Java Edition 1.16 and up	TPS and MSPT on Paper, Purpur, Forge and NeoForge; on Vanilla and Fabric from Minecraft 1.20.3
Mods and plugins	From their catalogue — no custom mod, plugin or modpack uploads, no FTP	The Modrinth and CurseForge catalogues, your own .jar uploads, and SFTP
Locations	Data centers in Europe	EU (France) and NA (Canada)

Every limit in the Aternos column is one Aternos states on the page it links to. We're not quoting a queue time: their queue shows you your own estimate while you're in it.

Where Aternos is the right call

For a lot of people, it still is:

• You're not sure Minecraft hosting is worth paying for yet. Try it free on Aternos first. If a queue doesn't bother you, you may never need to spend a cent.
• It's a one-off session. Quick build with a friend on a Saturday afternoon, no ongoing world to maintain — free and disposable is the correct tool, not paid and persistent.
• You want no hour cap and no bill, ever. Aternos is "Free. Forever." with no playtime limit. Our free tier stops at 20 hours a month.
• You play Bedrock Edition. Aternos hosts Bedrock servers. We host Java servers; Bedrock players can only join one through a crossplay add-on on the flat plan.

We're not trying to talk anyone out of a free server when free is what they need.

Where it hits a ceiling

The trade that keeps Aternos free is written down in their own help center: servers only run while someone is actively using them, a queue forms when their machines are full, and they say plainly that "it's not possible to guarantee a lag-free experience, especially for a free service". If that's fine for your group, it's a good deal. If your group plays at the same busy hours as everyone else and you're tired of guessing why it lags, that's the gap we built for:

• A reserved CPU share per running server, enforced by the platform's admission control: we won't start a server if doing so means overcommitting the node. When a node is full, the start is refused rather than every server on it slowing down.
• Metered billing that stops when the server sleeps. A 2 GB server that's awake five hours a week costs $0.12 that week on the metered plan, and a 4 GB one $0.24; awake time runs until the server hibernates after the last player leaves, a delay you set per server.
• MSPT next to TPS. TPS tells you the server has fallen behind; MSPT — the milliseconds each tick takes — shows how close it is to its 50 ms budget before TPS starts to drop. Both are on the server page on Paper, Purpur, Forge and NeoForge, and on Vanilla and Fabric from Minecraft 1.20.3.

Verdict

We have a free tier of our own: see if a server's open — 20 hours a month on a reserved CPU share, no card, no ads. If unlimited hours with no monthly cap is the hard requirement and a queue doesn't bother you, Aternos is still the right tool for that job — we mean that, and our capped free tier doesn't replace it. If you've outgrown the queue or need more than 20 free hours, see what your server would cost or spin one up and watch the tick line on yours.