What server is best for you *guide*

Xalogen's 1st Guide to Minecraft server running​

To help get you started with your own Minecraft survival server you have to ask yourself the following questions.

• What will I use?
• How many players should I max?
• How much RAM do I need?
• How many plugins should I use?
• Will my internet be able to handle this?

The first one is most likely easy because you wouldn't be on Bukkit if you didn't know.

Now with how many players you should max you should first do a simple test with 10 slots max,Do a speed test and see if you have the minimal requirements for a "okay" kind of server, get some of your friends to join in and try things out. If your server experiences one of the following errors then you might want to think about paying for a host.

• WARNING Is the server overloaded or did the system time change?
• any players who disconnect and in console it says "end of stream"

These errors occur when the server tries to access more bandwidth/memory than what the system has and in turn either drops the player *bandwidth* and or freezes up *out of memory*.

Say for instance your on a computer with 1gb of RAM and you try to run the server along with Minecraft, Minecraft uses up around 550,000 K memory usage alone and a server running on the same machine with only 1gb of RAM would already have both processes not responding or very unstable.

I would recommend if you were going to just make a vanilla (no plugins) Minecraft server for just maybe 5 to 8 of your friends online at once you could try on a 3 - 4 GB RAM system but here is where the connection comes into play. Say for instance your on Verizon Fiber Optics, you would have enough upload and download required to run a small friend server with no real plugins but as well as maybe 32 players and a couple of plugins. If you were wanting to become one of the top Minecraft survival servers with the hundreds of player slots and awesome plugins I would recommend making sure you can supply a stable server system that can hold a decent amount of uptime percent or just skip right over to hosting.

If you do have a server at home with a decent internet connection you could try up to 100 player slots with a minimum of 5-10 plugins. It all really depends on the server that's processing everything like what my friend has is a 96GB RAM rack server with an OC3 internet connection that can handle a load of over 15000 players without lagging while people like ObsidianCraft can only handle 50 without severe world and chat lag.

Server hosting is mostly the best way to go as those servers come pre-configured with plugins and stuff but lack the changing amount of slots. Hosts are the most reliable to use as their systems are build specifically for Minecraft servers and have been configured accordingly but they also lack in uptime as if you were the host and the server just randomly stopped you would instantly go and investigate the problem while with hosts they rarely have a backup system where your server will stay running and the downtime depends on how much work is needed which could range from 30 minutes to hours at most and in those times the people wanting to use your server will think that you didn't want the server anymore or just did't pay the bill. People have done that to me in the past but that's another story.


Sorry if I jumped around parts and made it hard to understand what I was hitting at. This is my first guide and feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

 

WOW Thx man!! (I'm a total Noob at server hosting)