Guides
How-to guides and tutorials for Minecraft servers
Practical guides for Minecraft server owners and players. Setup tutorials, plugin guides, version comparisons, and tips for growing your server.
We monitor hundreds of Minecraft servers around the clock. Here is what the data says: when Minecraft actually gets played, how brutally top-heavy the population is, how many servers quietly die each month, and more.
Read moreMost Minecraft server backups are quietly corrupt — copied while the server was still writing region files. Here's a setup that actually restores: safe saves, automated offsite copies, and a monthly restore drill.
Read moreMost lag advice is cargo-culted. This guide shows you how to tell TPS lag from network lag in 30 seconds with spark, then walks the seven changes that actually move tick times on a Paper server — ordered by impact.
Read moreThe honest answer, with numbers: 4 GB covers most vanilla and Paper servers up to ~20 players, modpacks need 6–10 GB, and past a certain point extra RAM makes performance worse. Here's the full sizing table and the JVM flags that matter.
Read moreWe analyzed a live snapshot of 366 Minecraft Java servers tracked by our monitoring system. The results: one in three online servers is completely empty, the top 5% of servers hold 91% of all players, and version fragmentation is worse than anyone admits.
Read moreMost server advertising advice is generic or outdated. Here are the 7 channels that actually bring players to a Minecraft server in 2026 — ranked by ROI, with realistic time and money costs.
Read moreFour major server software options dominate Minecraft Java in 2026: Paper, Spigot, Purpur, and Folia. Each has real trade-offs. Here's which to pick based on your server type and player count.
Read moreWhat does it actually cost to run a Minecraft server in 2026? We broke down the real monthly cost at every scale, from a 5-friend SMP to a 100+ player network — hardware, hosting, plugins, domains, the whole bill.
Read moreNuVotifier is the standard way to receive vote notifications from toplists and reward players in-game. This is the complete 2026 setup, including key generation, reward configuration, and testing.
Read moreIf your Minecraft server is online but empty, the problem is almost never the server itself — it's discovery. Here are the 7 real reasons no one is joining, and a fix for each.
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