TrueTick vs Exaroton: two pay-as-you-go hosts, compared

If you've decided that paying a flat monthly fee for a server nobody is on is a bad deal, you've probably already found Exaroton. It sells pay-as-you-go Minecraft hosting, and it comes from the team behind Aternos. This page is written by the paid competitor, so every claim we make about them below links to their own documentation — check it before you take our word for anything.

Here's the shape of this comparison up front, because most "vs" pages bury it: Exaroton meters by the gigabyte-hour, stops your server when it empties, starts it again when someone joins, parks them in a lobby while it boots, and shows live TPS. We do all of that too — our lobby on fewer server types, as the table shows — and at September 2026 exchange rates their rate is lower than ours. What differs is where the CPU comes from, what a stopped server costs, and a handful of features each of us has that the other doesn't.

Who each one is actually for

Exaroton is for players who want the cheapest metered hosting from an established name, on a CPU core shared with other servers — which, to be fair to them, is fine a lot of the time.

TrueTick is for players who want that same model on a CPU share the platform reserves for them, and who want to see what's eating the tick, not just that the tick is slow.

The comparison

Both of us reject "pay full price whether you play or not". Below is where that stops being the same product. Checked September 2026 — every Exaroton row links to their own docs:

	Exaroton	TrueTick
Metered rate	1 credit per GB of RAM per hour; 100 credits = €1, so €0.01 per GB-hour. They don't bill whole hours either — they "calculate the exact price and round it up to the next hundredth of a credit"	$0.012 per active GB-hour — at the ECB reference rate for 22 September 2026 (1 EUR = 1.1463 USD), their rate is about 4.5% below ours
Always-on, per GB	€7.20 per month at 24/7 (30 × 24 h × €0.01) — "servers on exaroton don't have a fixed monthly price", metered is the only mode	$3/GB-month on the flat plan — at September 2026 exchange rates, under half their metered cost
Idle cost	AutoStop stops an empty server for free. A stopped server still carries a storage fee of 10 credits (€0.10) a month, less every credit it spent running that month — and "If you do not have enough credits to pay the storage fee, we have to delete your server"	$0 while asleep on the metered plan. No storage fee, and a sleeping paid server isn't deleted when the balance runs out
Wake on join	AutoStart boots the server when someone connects — Java Edition, and Bedrock Edition on its latest version — free	wake-on-join, same idea, for Java Edition
While it boots	Offline waiting lobby — players wait in a holding world and are transferred when it's up	wake-limbo on Paper, Purpur and Vanilla servers from Minecraft 1.20.5 to 1.21.11 — players wait in-game and get transferred; on other servers the join is held, and the player is asked to rejoin if the server isn't up yet
CPU	0.5 shared cores per GB — "a shared CPU core doesn't mean exclusive usage rights for a specific core but general usage equal to a single core if possible"	A reserved share per running server; admission control refuses to overcommit a node
Live metrics	player count, RAM, CPU and TPS, in their panel	the same, plus MSPT on Paper, Purpur, Forge and NeoForge — nothing to install. Where the core prints percentiles (Paper, Purpur, Vanilla and Fabric from Minecraft 1.20.3) we also show the p95 tail; Forge, NeoForge and older Paper/Purpur print none, and the panel says so instead of drawing a flat line. On those same 1.20.3+ cores the rate is counted off the world's own tick counter rather than inferred from tick time; below 1.20.3 Vanilla and Fabric have no tick command at all
RAM	2 to 16 GB self-serve; more if you "contact our support if you have a valid use case"	up to 16 GB self-serve; 24 or 32 GB on request
Bedrock Edition	Bedrock servers — Vanilla, Preview and Nukkit	Java servers only; Bedrock players can join a flat-plan server through a crossplay add-on
Sharing the bill	Credit pools — "Share payments for your server with your friends"	One wallet per account

Where Exaroton is the right call

• You want the lowest metered rate. Theirs is lower. €0.01 per GB-hour against our $0.012 — at September 2026 exchange rates that's about 4.5% in their favour, every hour. If you're counting cents on a small server, that's a real difference and it isn't in our favour.
• Their argument for shared cores is a real argument, not a dodge. Their docs say assigning cores exclusively "would be much more expensive and is usually unnecessary since the full CPU power is only required during short load peaks." For a lot of servers that is simply true, and they price accordingly.
• You play Bedrock Edition. They host Bedrock servers, and AutoStart works for Bedrock too. We run Java servers; Bedrock players can only join one through a crossplay add-on on the flat plan, which never sleeps.
• Your friends want to chip in. Credit pools let several people pay for one server. Here, one account's wallet pays.
• You want backups in your own cloud. Exaroton can save backups to cloud storage such as Google Drive. Ours are stored with us, and each one has a Download button.

If your server is small, quiet and occasional, this is a close call and their price wins it.

Where it hits a ceiling

Their case for sharing cores rests on one assumption: that load peaks are short and don't line up. For most workloads that's a good assumption. Minecraft isn't most workloads — prime time is the same Friday evening for everyone on the node. The peaks correlate. A shared core is at its worst exactly when your server is at its busiest, which is exactly when you're watching.

That's the assumption we don't make:

• A share we don't oversell. Every running server's CPU share is reserved, and admission control blocks creating or starting a server the node can't actually carry. When we're full, the panel says we're full instead of selling you a seat anyway.
• MSPT and its tail, not just TPS. Exaroton shows TPS, so you'll see the drop. MSPT is the tick budget — it tells you what is eating the tick, which is the part you can act on. On Paper, Purpur, Forge and NeoForge it's in the panel with nothing to install; on Vanilla and Fabric it arrives from Minecraft 1.20.3. The p95 tail is where lag actually lives — a world can average a comfortable 48 ms and still stutter — but only cores answering the vanilla tick command print percentiles, so the tail appears on Paper, Purpur, Vanilla and Fabric from 1.20.3 and nowhere else. Where a core prints none, the panel says so rather than guess.
• A flat plan for when metered stops making sense. If the server really is up 24/7, metering is the wrong tool at any rate — theirs works out to €7.20/GB-month against our $3/GB-month flat, which at September 2026 exchange rates is under half.
• A sleeping server that stays put. Here a paid server costs nothing while it's asleep and isn't deleted when your balance runs out. On Exaroton a server owes a monthly storage fee unless it spent 10 credits running that month, and a server whose fee can't be paid is deleted.

Verdict

If you want the cheapest metered hosting from an established name, and a shared core is fine for your server, take Exaroton. They're good at this, at September 2026 exchange rates their rate beats ours, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.

If you want the same model on a CPU share the platform refuses to oversell, MSPT for when something does go wrong, or a flat plan that costs less than metered on an always-on server — check the maths for your server or create one and watch the tick line yourself.