Paper server hosting
Paper is the default here, and the core where you can see the most about what your server is actually doing.
Why Paper, and when not to
Paper is a fork of the vanilla server that rewrites large parts of the tick loop and exposes the timings behind it. For most people running a survival world or an SMP with plugins it is the right default: it handles high entity counts far better than vanilla, and it takes Bukkit/Spigot plugins, which is most of the plugin ecosystem.
It is the wrong choice in two cases, and it is worth saying so on a page trying to sell it. If you want to run mods rather than plugins — anything from CurseForge or a Modrinth modpack — you need Fabric, Forge or NeoForge instead; Paper does not load them. And if you want the vanilla game's exact behaviour for a technical farm, Paper's optimisations can change the mechanics you are relying on, so plain Vanilla is safer.
What you can see that most hosts don't show
Paper is one of the cores that reports its own tick performance, and the panel reads it rather than estimating. From Minecraft 1.20.3 the number comes from the server's own tick counter: how many ticks actually happened over the seconds that actually passed. That is the whole distinction — counting what the world did, instead of inferring it from how long an average tick took.
Paper also reports percentiles, so alongside the headline rate you get the p95 tail from the core's own recent ticks — the spikes an average hides. Forge and NeoForge print no percentiles at all, and the panel says so there instead of inventing one.
What we configure before you touch it
A new Paper server does not start on stock settings. It starts with Aikar's G1GC flags, two server.properties keys, and seeded spigot.yml, bukkit.yml and config/paper-world-defaults.yml — the full list, and what each key does, is written out in the pre-tuned configs guide rather than hidden behind a marketing word like "optimised".
The JVM heap is also deliberately set below your memory tier rather than equal to it, because the container's memory limit has to cover non-heap JVM memory and page cache too. Setting them equal is the classic cause of a server that dies with exit code 137 and no Java error in the log. Every file we seed stays yours — the file manager can change any of them, and nothing overwrites your edits.
The part that decides whether it plays well
Minecraft runs the world on one thread, so the ceiling on a Paper server is how much uncontended CPU time it gets every 50 milliseconds. That is not a property of the core you choose — it is a property of how many neighbours your host put on the same thread.
Here, CPU is reserved per active server and admission control refuses to start a server on a node that has no capacity left, rather than squeezing it in. We measured what the alternative costs instead of asserting it: one server on a thread versus three on the same thread, published with the method, the raw samples and the runs that failed review.
Where the claims on this page come from
Nothing above is a slogan we can't back. The tuning is listed file by file in what we change on every server and why. The heap-versus-container problem, and the exit code it produces, is written up in why a Minecraft server runs out of memory. The oversell comparison is a published run with its raw data: what a 3:1 CPU oversell costs a Minecraft server. And the fleet's current state is on the live status page, whatever it happens to say today.