Hardware

If you haven’t identified the type of hosting you wish to go for it’s highly recommended to read our types of hosting document first.

Note

The first point we want to stress is do not go out and buy the latest flagship CPU for a single Minecraft server. This is a complete waste of money and you will not be able to utilise the full CPU, you should however find a hosting provider that offers the desired CPU line up and use ‘shared hosting’.

CPU

When it comes to finding a CPU (for Minecraft) the most important factor is the IC, this consists of a fetch, decode, read and execute cycle all taking place to complete a single cycle.

Depending on your workload, CPU Cache & Instruction Sets should also be considered as one CPU might be better at a particular set than another (it’s important to complete your own research based on your needs).

The myth of clock speed being the sole performance factor has been disproven many times over, Apple being the most famous example that often compared a lower clock speed PowerPC to the newer Pentium 3/4 line ups from IBM and similar.

At its core Minecraft’s main logic loop is a single thread this is a fundamental issue that dictates how it runs. Consequently, Minecraft is primarily concerned with single core performance. You still need at least two cores however, the second is to offload things like Garbage Collection and non core logic threads (networking, io) to so they don’t steal time from the main loop.

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RAM

RAM is not nearly as important as people think, fast RAM is as important (it’s benefits only go as far as your chosen CPU) as the capacity and over capacity of RAM can hurt your performance (this is because the JVM garbage collector has more to collect and therefore this intensive CPU task takes longer causing lag spikes).

The general consensus as of late 2022 is to start with using 4GB / 6GB but use no more than 12GB per individual server.

Memory allocation and Java Flags go hand in hand with one another and some flags (specifically Aikar’s) have some values that change based on the total RAM allocation to your server.

If you’re running in Docker consider overhead for the JVM, this should be about 1/2GB that you will need to compensate for (sometimes the host will take care of this step for you).

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Storage

For your server’s live application data it’s the current consensus to at least be using some form of flash storage as the random read/write speeds can help massively when it comes to users spawning in chunks all over the map.

For backups you are still more than welcome to use spinning disks as this data hopefully isn’t used as often - it’s also possible to configure archival s3 based storage (cold-site) which could end up cheaper than buying and protecting your own disks.

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Recommended Specs

If you’re looking for specific specs we’d recommend using the below as a baseline.

SKU	CPU	RAM	DISK
Budget	Intel 9th - 12th Gen / Ryzen 9 3000 - Ryzen 7 5800X	4GB - 6GB	30GB (NVMe)
Enthusiast	Intel 13th & 14th Gen / Ryzen 9 5900X & 7000 Series	8GB - 12GB	75GB+ (NVMe)