Minecraft hosting pricing that bills for reality

Most Minecraft hosts sell you a tier and bill it every month whether anyone logs in or not. That is a fine deal for a server that really is busy all day, and a poor one for the far more common case: a world a handful of friends visit in the evenings and forget about for a fortnight. So there are two ways to pay here, and they are the same product — the same guaranteed CPU, the same panel, the same metrics.

Metered charges $0.012 per GB-hour for the time the server is awake. An empty metered server shuts itself down and starts again the moment a player connects, so the hours it spends asleep are hours you are not billed for. That only works because the platform can wake a server on the join itself, which is why scale-to-zero is a billing model here rather than a button you remember to press. The wait before it sleeps (8 minutes by default, and you can change it per server) is awake time, billed like any other.

Flat charges $3.00 per GB of RAM a month, billed per UTC day the server runs — a day it stays stopped isn't charged — and keeps the server up around the clock while it runs. It is the better deal past roughly the point where a metered bill would have added up to a full month anyway — and it is the right choice when a server needs to answer instantly at any hour, or when it runs something that must never stop, like a proxy in front of a network.

What does not change between them is the part that decides whether your server actually plays well: CPU is reserved per active server and not sold twice, which is enforced by admission control rather than by good intentions. We measured what the alternative costs rather than asserting it. Whichever plan you pick, you can price your own hours in the calculator, resize from the panel later, and take your world with you if you leave.