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Your own Minecraft server is great, but there are many disadvantages. Cloud Minecraft hosting from Hipposerve gives you fast, stable gaming.
Minecraft has grown into one of the world’s most popular games, thanks to its huge online communities and the endless range of mods available. While many players use public servers, private Minecraft servers are increasingly popular for those who want full control.
With your own server, you can create a private world, set your own rules, install the mods you want, and play exclusively with friends.
Many players start by hosting a Minecraft server on a computer at home. It feels like the cheapest and simplest option. However, once gameplay becomes more established, home hosting often introduces performance, reliability, and cost issues.
Below, we explain why cloud hosting is usually a better choice than running a Minecraft server from your own home.
Cloud-based VPS or dedicated servers are designed to do one job: run your Minecraft server efficiently.
When hosting at home, performance is easily affected by other activity. Operating system updates, photo editing, or other household members using the same computer can quickly bring gameplay to a halt.
Even with a dedicated home machine, you still share your internet connection. Streaming services, downloads, and video calls all consume bandwidth and cause lag.
By hosting your Minecraft server in the cloud, your server benefits from dedicated resources and high bandwidth, ensuring smooth gameplay for all players.
Home-hosted servers depend entirely on your local setup. If your computer shuts down, your internet connection drops, or a forced update restarts the system, your Minecraft server goes offline.
This usually happens at the worst possible moment, disconnecting all active players and disrupting gameplay.
With a hosted Minecraft server, you benefit from continuous availability.
Reliable hosting providers keep your server online even when your home connection isn’t.
Running a Minecraft server at home isn’t as cheap as it first appears. A computer under constant load can draw significant power.
Based on UK electricity costs, a system drawing around 500W can cost over £1,200 per year to run continuously. That’s before future price increases.
By comparison, cloud-hosted Minecraft servers can start from as little as £4.99 per month, equating to under £60 per year.
Even higher-performance servers typically cost far less than running equivalent hardware at home.
Residential internet connections are optimised for downloads, not for hosting online services. Upstream bandwidth is often limited and latency can be inconsistent.
Minecraft servers rely on strong upstream performance and low-latency network routes.
Cloud-hosted servers benefit from:
This ensures smooth, responsive gameplay, regardless of what’s happening on your home network.
When something goes wrong with a home-hosted server, you’re responsible for fixing it. Hardware failures, power issues, or network faults can mean extended downtime.
With cloud hosting, while the Minecraft software itself is yours to manage, the underlying hardware and network are professionally maintained.
If infrastructure issues occur, they’re handled quickly by the hosting provider, minimising disruption.
Hipposerve offers cloud-hosted Minecraft servers with pre-installed software, starting from just £4.99 per month.
Servers can be deployed in minutes and include support for multiple versions, including:
You get full console access, complete control via a VNC interface, and the flexibility of a home server without the performance, reliability, or cost drawbacks.
The articles you’ll find here are part of Hipposerve’s growing archive, and some go back a little way. That means you may occasionally spot references to products we no longer offer, pricing that has since changed, or technologies and advice that reflected best practice at the time of writing but may not fully align with current thinking. We always aim to keep things accurate, but the web moves fast.
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