Every group of friends who play Minecraft together goes through the same arc. Someone opens their world to LAN. It works until they close the game. Then someone leaves a PC running in a bedroom, which works until the electricity bill or the router reboots. Eventually somebody says “we should just get a server.”
This is the honest version of what that involves.
What a Minecraft server actually needs
Minecraft is not a normal web app. It holds the active world in memory and runs the world simulation on a single tick loop, so it is genuinely sensitive to both RAM and single-core speed. Most “my server is lagging” posts are a memory problem wearing a costume.
Rough numbers:
- ~2 GB is the floor. It will boot and it will run, and you will feel it with more than a couple of players.
- ~6 GB is where a normal server with friends, a normal view distance and a world that has been played in for a while stops being annoying.
- Mods and plugins push this up, sometimes a lot. So does view distance, which is the single setting most worth turning down before buying more RAM.
Player count matters less than people expect. Ten people standing in one base cost less than four people exploring in four directions, because loaded chunks are the thing that costs memory.
What it costs
Suji VMs are billed hourly, and you pick the size:
| Size | Specs | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Small | 2 vCPU, 4 GB | €12.99 |
| Medium | 4 vCPU, 8 GB | €19.99 |
| Large | 8 vCPU, 16 GB | €39.99 |
For Minecraft specifically: Small runs a light server for a few people. Medium is the one I would actually recommend if you want to stop thinking about it, because 8 GB gives the server ~6 GB to work with and leaves room for the admin panel.
Two things worth being straight about.
A card is required from the start, and billing begins the moment the VM provisions. There is no free tier here.
And stopping a VM does not stop the bill. The disk, the IP and the reserved compute are still yours while it is stopped, so a stopped VM costs the same as a running one. Only terminating it stops the meter. If your group plays in bursts and you want to genuinely pause spending between seasons, take a snapshot, terminate the VM, and rebuild from the snapshot when you come back. I would rather tell you that now than have you discover it on an invoice.
Setting it up
The Minecraft app in the Suji marketplace runs a Java Edition server managed by Crafty Controller, a web admin panel. You create servers, edit properties, start and stop them, and take backups from a browser. No SSH, no editing server.properties over a terminal, unless you want to.
Create a VM, or pick one with free capacity. Then dashboard, then Apps, then Minecraft, then Install. There is nothing to fill in, no API keys, no tokens. About a minute later you get a panel URL that looks like https://minecraft-something.suji.fr.
Now for the two steps that are not obvious.
Finding your admin password
Crafty creates an admin user on first boot with a randomly generated password. There is no setting to choose it in advance, so you go and fetch it. Two ways.
The easy way, from the logs. Dashboard, then your instance, then the Logs tab, then pick Minecraft. On first boot Crafty prints the generated credentials straight into the log. Look for a line with the username and password.
The reliable way, from the file. Crafty also writes them to disk. Dashboard, then your instance, then the Files tab, switch the root to the Minecraft install’s volume, and open default-creds.txt (container path /crafty/app/config/default-creds.txt). It is a small JSON file with username and password in it.
Use the file if the log has already scrolled past, which it will have if the server has been up a while.
Then open the panel URL, log in as admin, and change the password in Crafty’s user settings. It is a randomly generated string sitting in a plaintext file on the volume, which is fine as a bootstrap and not something to keep forever.
One thing that will alarm you and should not: your browser will warn about the certificate. Crafty serves a self-signed cert on port 8443 and the tunnel passes it through untouched. The connection is still encrypted end to end. Click through it.
Creating the actual server
Installing the app does not give you a running Minecraft server. It gives you Crafty, which is the thing that manages servers. You still have to make one.
Inside the panel:
- Click Create New Server.
- Choose the type and version. Java vanilla and whichever version your group has agreed on, which is its own negotiation.
- Set the server name, and the options: memory, world settings, whatever you care about.
- Accept the Mojang EULA when prompted. Nothing will start until you do, and this is the step people miss.
- Click Create. Crafty downloads the server jar, which takes a moment.
- Open the server’s page and hit Start, the play button.
Watch the console. When it prints Done! the world is loaded and you can connect. Before that, clients will just fail to join.
Handing out the right address
This is the one that catches nearly everyone, so it is worth saying plainly.
The admin panel and the game are not at the same address.
The Crafty panel is the https://minecraft-something.suji.fr URL behind your tunnel. That is where you administer things. It is not where your friends connect, and if you hand it out nobody will be able to join, with an error message that does not explain why.
The game server listens on the VM’s public IP at port 25565. On the install detail page there is a Connect (Minecraft) section showing that address with a copy button. That is what goes in your friends’ multiplayer list. Port 25565 is the default, so they can usually leave it off.
Worth knowing before you get creative: only one server is publicly reachable, the one bound to 25565. You can create as many as you like in Crafty for testing or admin purposes, but players will not reach them unless you remap ports.
The full click-by-click, including what to do when the password does not appear and the handful of things that genuinely go wrong, is in the Minecraft app docs.
What you get, and what you give up
Running your own server is better in the ways that matter to people who like Minecraft:
- Mods and plugins. Fabric, Paper, whatever you like. This is the main reason to do it.
- The world is a file you own. You can download it, back it up, move it somewhere else, keep it forever.
- Snapshots. Take one before installing that mod pack everyone is arguing about.
- The whole machine. It is a VM. If you want to run a Discord bot or a map renderer next to the server, nothing stops you.
It is worse in one honest way: you are now the admin. When a mod update breaks world loading at 11pm, that is your evening. A managed service exists precisely so it is somebody else’s evening, and if your group only wants vanilla survival with cross-play on phones and consoles, a managed service is genuinely the better answer. Java Edition only, here.
Self-hosting is worth it when you want control. It is not worth it as a way to save twenty euros while inheriting a second job.
If you want to try it
Create a Medium VM, install the Minecraft app, hand your friends the IP. If it turns out not to be for you, snapshot the world so you keep it, and terminate the VM.
The docs cover the rest, including the troubleshooting for the two or three things that actually go wrong.