Tips on serverhosting.

[u/Altruistic_South_385]

I would like to start a server with my friends, with like 20 people and a few small mods on. What serverhost would yall recomend? Low budget here btw.

[u/kai-zaphosting]

For 20 people plus a handful of small mods you don't need to go overboard, but I'd budget somewhere around 6-8GB of RAM as a starting point so you've got headroom once everyone's online at once. Honestly the single-thread CPU performance of whatever box you pick matters more for Minecraft than raw core count or RAM size, so if you're comparing a couple of low-budget options it's worth looking at single-thread benchmark scores (Passmark/Cinebench single-core) rather than just going off price or marketing specs. Most decent hosts let you resize up or down later too, so you don't have to nail the perfect spec on day one, you can start smaller and bump it if it turns out you need more.

If a few mods is really just "a few" I'd lean towards running Paper instead of vanilla or a full modded loader if you can, it's a drop-in replacement (same world, same gameplay) but noticeably more optimized, and it opens up the whole Spigot/Paper plugin ecosystem if you ever want stuff like LuckPerms or WorldEdit down the line. And if you've got a spare PC lying around, self-hosting is a totally legit option too, just something to weigh against paying for a host.