Help a new player make a small server?

Hey welcome to AC

Could you clarify what you mean by “I was also considering forge if free or local hosting isn’t something within my capabilities.”

I'll try.

Basically, I was hoping to find a way to create a server and either run it on some kind of free cloud service, (i heard Oracle can be used this way, but it seems pretty complex for me) or to run it locally on my own PC when my group wants to game.

If I can't manage that, I was considering the Forge Game Server service of around 1 GB for 5.29 per month. But I want to keep costs minimal since I'm usally a pretty broke college students.

Well, self hosting is very popular and recommended (if you have the hardware/network for it).

If not, Oracle could be a choice. They’re free and widely used but it requires more technical knowledge than you may care to learn for a simple MC server

I would definitely NOT get a “Forge Game Server” as $5+/GB is.. well a scam

Self Hosting would be nice and I think my hardware and network is pretty good, its kind of dated (i.e not top of the line for 2025, but it can run pretty well, I do a lot of 3d Modeling)

I'm just not sure where to start since most guides online seem to be trying to sell me something?

I see, Forge Game Server is a scam? It was linked on the admincraft reddit so I assumed it was trusted?

Back in the day anyone could link their host to the AC subreddit’s marketplace. The old marketplace (which is no longer maintained) is totally separate from #service-providers / #marketplace-info (which are new to this Discord server).

I would recommend checking out #service-providers , which includes only hosts that underwent our minimum 1wk review process and have been vetted

In terms of self hosting, it’s certainly the most cost efficient if you don’t have to buy any new hardware/network upgrades

Do you know what your specs are, most importantly CPU and RAM? Also what kind of speed are you paying your ISP for?

Understandable. I'll check that out if I can't host locally.

it would be ideal if I can self host.

My CPU is a AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8 Core Processer with 3.60 GHZ, and I have 128 GB of ram.

The ISP provides both 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi.

I use an ethernet cord with its connection it seems to have a 1000 MBPS Link Speed. Functionally its around 442.1 Mbps download and 40.5 Mps upload with a latency of around 16ms

few things worth noting while you’re writing your response:

- Create, and the modpacks that use it, tend to be on the much more intensive side, so good hardware will be necessary if there’s going to be lots of tinkering with Create

- Self-hosting from the same PC you’ll be playing from isn’t ideal and will definitely slow things down, especially at scale

- You said 5-10 friends. Is that max or expected concurrent? (What is your expected concurrent players?)

- It will be very important that you pregenerate the world but if you want to add mods after initial world creation, there won’t be new chunks for new things

- Your CPU is probably fine although using it at the same time as the server might cause some issues (my dedicated server uses the same CPU)

Hmm. Good to know. I may have to consider 3rd party hosting? but might it still be worth trying local hosting anyways since none of us are super diehard players yet?

As for players, 10 would probably be the max. At any given time I would expect about 3-5 concurrent players.

442/40 will be fine, I’m guesstimating you’ll be under 10 Mbps upload with just 5 concurrent

It’s always worth trying IMO. Worst case scenario is you quickly find out it doesn’t work, then move on

you have plenty ram but do you know the speed?

The ram speed is 3200 MHz.

I assume this guide for local hosting should be good? but IDK if it supports mods?

https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-How-to-Setup-a-Minecraft-Java-Edition-Server

Yeah that speed is perfectly fine and honestly with only 5 concurrent and that much RAM, you should be more than fine using your PC with the 3700X for playing and hosting simultaneously. I would pregen the world though 100%

I would definitely not use that guide (it’s for Vanilla servers)

do you have space on an SSD for the server files? (HDD could bottleneck chunk loading)

I’d recommend following this guide to get started: https://www.setup.md/guides/self-host/win.html

You’ll want to use either Forge or Fabric for your server jar, whichever is applicable to the modpack you’re playing

During the guide it’ll have you open notepad to create a bat file for starting your server. This also includes your JVM flags like allocated RAM.

Instead of using the simple one in the guide, I’d actually recommend generating one with Auto-restart and 8GB allocated here: https://flags.sh