Minecraft server rental, charged by the hour.

One thing: the time your server spends online. Each size has an hourly rate, and that rate is counted by the minute while the server is awake — not rounded up to the next whole hour — then drawn from a balance you topped up in advance. There is no monthly fee underneath it, no setup fee, no charge per friend and nothing to cancel.

Not the hourly rate — only a small storage fee, because your world, mods and backups stay on disk ready for the next session. That fee is already inside the monthly estimate shown for each size, so what you see there is the whole cost, not just the awake part.

Yes, and that is the point of the wake. Whoever tries to connect first starts the world, so you do not need to be online, awake or at a computer for your group to play. That first player sees a short waking-up message and, when the world was played recently, reconnects 15 to 30 seconds later and is in — a few minutes if it had been idle for days — and everyone joining after that goes straight through. If you would rather be the only person who can start it, auto-start is a switch you can turn off, and players are told the server is not accepting starts instead of being left guessing.

There is no monthly price to quote, because the bill follows your hours. A group playing a couple of evenings a week uses about 40 hours in a month, and the Regular row on each size card in the pricing table on this page is that month's total, live for each region. Multiplying the rate by all 730 hours in a month prices a server that never sleeps. Start on the size that fits today and resize any time with a quick restart.

Every charge is itemised in your account. The activity ledger lists each top-up and each drawdown as it happens, and each finished month becomes a bill you can open per server, showing the hours it was awake, the rate that applied and the amount. The current month carries a running estimate on the same screen, so you can check the meter partway through rather than waiting for it to close.

The server stops rather than charging on, and your world stays exactly where it was. Starting a server, taking a backup or downloading your world all need a balance above $0.10, and if the balance sits at zero for seven days the server is removed — topping up again before then cancels that. Because it is prepaid, the most a month can cost you is what you chose to top up. Before the first top-up, a world nobody joins for 14 days is removed, with an in-app warning first. Once you have topped up at least once, a world is never deleted for sitting unplayed.

Yes, and it is the normal way to use Pixly. Create the world, play the weekend, then let it sleep — you are charged the hourly rate for the hours it was online, plus the small storage fee while it waits. There is no term to commit to and no plan to cancel afterwards, so a one-weekend event costs a weekend of hours.

Setup is three screens and about 30 seconds: sign in with Google, name your server, and share the address. New accounts start with about 10 hours to try, no card, so you can get a world up and play a session before adding any funds.

No. The server runs on Pixly's hardware, so there is nothing for them to configure — you share your permanent address, they paste it into Minecraft and join.

Yes — every world is private by default. A friends-only whitelist is on out of the box, so only people you add can join. You can open it up or keep it locked down whenever you like.

Yes. Pick a moddable server type when you create the world, then search CurseForge and Modrinth in-panel and install in one click. For mixed groups pick a crossplay-capable type and flip the Bedrock cross-play switch: Pixly auto-installs Geyser and Floodgate on your Java server, so Java and Bedrock players join and play in the same world.

No. Plan sizes set CPU and RAM, not a player cap — the player counts shown on each size are guidance for what runs smoothly, not limits, and you choose the maximum in your server's settings. On hourly billing the size of the group barely moves the bill either: two friends or twenty cost the same per hour, because you are paying for the server rather than per person. If your group outgrows a size, you can move up at any time and the hourly rate changes with it.

Yes. Pixly runs in Portland, Ashburn, Frankfurt and Singapore — two in the US, one in Europe, one in Asia-Pacific — and you choose one when you create the server. Rather than guessing from a map, the create screen measures your group's real latency to each one and marks the fastest, so the choice is made on your numbers. Hourly rates differ a little by region and each rate is shown alongside it, while every feature — mods, crossplay, whitelist and backups — is identical in all three.

Yes. Every server runs behind DDoS protection, included at no extra cost. It absorbs the common floods of junk traffic that would otherwise knock players offline.