How much does a Minecraft server cost?

At the popular subscription hosts, a 4 GB plan — enough for a group of friends — is $6.99 a month at Hostinger on a two-year prepay (renewing at $11.99)³, $11.99 at BisectHosting¹, $14.99 at Apex Hosting⁴ and $15.99 at Shockbyte²; Minecraft Realms is a flat $7.99 for Java⁵. Each of those buys the whole month, all ~730 hours of it. On hourly hosting like Pixly there is no monthly figure to quote: you are charged by the minute only while the server is online, so the month is your played hours multiplied by the plan's rate, and a group playing two or three evenings a week lands far below any of those stickers. The worked example on this page prices three real play patterns from today's live rates.

Not always. You can run one on your own PC for nothing but electricity, provided you are willing to leave that machine on, open your home network to your friends and be the one who restarts it. Aternos hosts servers at no charge and pays for it with queues, shared hardware and manual starts.⁶ Everything else is paid, and what you are buying is a machine that is always reachable, backed up and not your laptop. Pixly starts every new account with about 10 hours of play to try, no card needed.

No — the game is a one-off purchase, and owning it never expires. What can cost money every month is a server: a world that stays reachable so friends can join it whenever they like, which is separate from the copy of the game on your machine. Playing on someone else's server costs you nothing beyond the game. Running your own is what this page prices, and on hourly hosting it follows the hours you play rather than arriving as a fixed monthly bill.

You top up a Wallet — $5 minimum, $100 maximum in one payment — and nothing is ever billed after the fact, so the balance is a hard ceiling on what a month can cost. The meter runs while your server is up, counts by the minute rather than rounding up to whole hours, and stops when the world goes to sleep. When the last player disconnects the server saves and shuts down on its own; the next person to connect wakes it, and when the world was played recently they are in 15 to 30 seconds later. If the balance ever runs out the server stops rather than charging on.

Open the activity ledger in your account: every top-up and every drawdown is listed as it happens, each finished month becomes a bill you can expand per server, and the current month carries a running estimate on the same screen. If the hours in a bill do not match the sessions you remember, that is the number to query — a meter you cannot check is not worth much.

On a subscription, exactly the same as a busy week — the quiet hours are the ones you notice least and pay for anyway. On Pixly there is no hourly charge while the world is asleep, only a small storage fee that keeps your world, mods and backups ready for the next session. That fee is already inside every monthly estimate shown here, so those figures are the whole cost rather than the awake part.

It stays where it is. A running server stops on its own once the balance drops to $0.10 or less, rather than charging on; top up and start it again and the world is exactly as you left it. Starting a server, taking a backup and downloading your world each need a balance above $0.10, so keep a dollar in there if you want to export. If the balance sits at zero for seven days the server is removed, and topping up again before then cancels that. Before an account's first top-up, a world nobody joins for 14 days is removed, with a week's warning in the app and any player joining resetting the clock. Once you have topped up at least once, a world is never deleted for sitting unplayed.

One account owns the world and its balance, and that balance pays for every hour the server is awake, whoever is playing. Friends do not need an account, a card, or anything else to join, and they cannot be charged for playing. There is no split billing between accounts today, so a group that shares the cost settles it between themselves and one person tops up — which is far less bookkeeping than it sounds, because the whole month is a few dollars of hours rather than a subscription somebody has to carry.

Renewal jumps are the common trap on monthly plans: Hostinger's $6.99 4 GB price is a 24-month prepay that renews at $11.99, and its $9.49 8 GB plan renews at $14.99. Pixly has no setup fee and no subscription, so there is no renewal price to jump — the per-hour rate you see is the one you keep paying. The bill is your played hours plus a small storage fee. Nothing is sold as an add-on: daily backups, crossplay and voice chat are included on every plan.

Bigger plans carry more CPU and RAM for larger groups and heavier modpacks, and a higher rate for each hour they run. Plans go from Meadow (1 vCPU / 4 GB, comfortable for around 10 players) to Realm (8 vCPU / 64 GB, 100+ players) — those player counts are smooth-play guidance, not caps, and the maximum is yours to set on every plan. The size of your group barely moves the bill on its own: two players or twenty cost the same per hour, because you rent the server rather than the seats. Rates also vary by the region you host in, only active hours are billed, and you can move between plans as the group grows.