Today we stopped offering free Minecraft servers, and we removed every advertisement from this site. If you already have a free server, stop worrying right now: it keeps running exactly as before. Same 8 GB, same address, same rules. Nothing changes for you and you do not need to do anything. This only affects new orders.
Here is the honest reason, with the actual numbers. At the time of writing we run 151 free Minecraft servers and 2 paid ones. The free servers are not the problem — we like them, and building them was the whole point. The problem is that 2 paid servers cannot pay for the hardware that 151 free servers run on. We were covering the gap out of pocket and topping it up with ad revenue, which is why there were ads on a hosting site in the first place. Neither of those is a business. It is a countdown.
So rather than let the whole thing quietly degrade — slower nodes, longer queues, servers that never wake up — we are fixing the maths first. Paid plans start at $2 a month. That is the price of the smallest Always On server: 8 GB of RAM, unlimited players, running 24/7, no sleep timer, no ShadowNode branding on your server list.
And here is the part we want to be held to: the free plan comes back at 10 paid Minecraft servers. Not "eventually", not "if things go well" — ten. That is roughly the point where the paid side covers the hardware the free side sits on, which means free servers stop being something we subsidise and start being something the platform can actually carry. When we hit it, free servers return, and we will announce it right here on this blog.
Why ten and not fifty? Because we are not trying to get rich off this. Ten paid servers is the break-even line, not a profit target. We would rather set a number you can watch us reach than make a vague promise that never has to be kept.
What this means if you are on a free server today: keep playing. Your server stays. The 14-day inactivity archive still works the way it always did — 10 days without anyone joining gets you a warning on your order page, 14 days archives the world safely, and you can restore it any time from that same page. Your world is not deleted.
What this means if you were about to create a free server: we are sorry, the timing is genuinely bad and we know it. The $2 plan is the same machine without the sleep timer, and it is the single most direct way to bring the free tier back for everyone else. If $2 is not possible for you right now, that is completely fair — put yourself on the waitlist and we will let you know the moment free servers return.
No ads, no sleep timers, no upsell popups, and a number we have to hit in public. That is the deal. See you at ten.