the minecraft files

remember... the most permanent solutions are the temporary solutions - YHT

the minecraft files ™️

This is my public "dump" of knowledge I've gained over my time of running, developing, and providing support for Minecraft servers. Both some rants & personal experiences, but mainly advice.

This is mainly oriented for Paper & derivative software servers, but maybe I'll expand it for fabric as well.

Note

The format of this gist is more so an informal brain dump rather than a structured document. good luck :)
Also the below ToC references categories that aren't done yet, so have fun with that too

Table of Contents

Quick spots for navigation

Server Hosts - Who to use and who to avoid

Warning

DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with any hosting provider.
Everything below is unbiased and is providing both personal experiences and experiences from other trusted individuals.

Server hosts are a mixed bag. I'll try talk about some good options for budget, medium (?) budget, and pricier options, as well as who to avoid.

Tip

A few bits of terminology to know:

• "Shared hosts" - These are your typical hosts like Pebblehost, Apex Hosting, Nitrado, etc. You're allocated resources from a single machine with multiple customers online. Most server owners will start with a shared host.
• "Dedicated hosts" - These are hosting providers that provide dedicated machines with dedicated hardware, such as OVH, (un)ReliableSite, and Hetzner. 100% more pricey, but more suitable for larger servers who have quite aggressive resource demands.
• "Summer hosts" - These are your average run-of-the-mill hosts that pop up all the time. Prices that are often too good to be true, often unethical practices of advertisement, and scummy management. They rarely last a reasonable amount of time, and you're bound to encounter a few of them.

Let's start with shared hosts:

In terms of who to avoid, I like to call them the "big bad three":

• Shockbyte
• Apex
• Bisect

These are easily some of the biggest hosting providers on the planet (not just for Minecraft), and yet they have pretty crappy hardware, relatively oversold, some brutal $/gb pricing, and oftentimes god awful panels.
Back in the day, I used Bisect, and their panel was pretty horrific. Quite nicely designed, but clunky and the file manager was... god awful.
Granted, last I checked, Shockbyte did a full panel overhaul and it looked great (I was one of the few beta testing it) despite the reverse shell exploit they had... oops!

General tips when looking for good hosts:

Hardware

When looking at hardware, if a host's front pages do not display any hardware details, or generalise them (i.e. "Ryzen and EPYC processors"), that's a red flag.
When you're looking for a solid host, single thread performance is key - after all, the main core of Minecraft's features run on a single thread (known as the "Server thread").

So you're not necessarily looking at what CPU has the most cores/threads or the best overall score, you want to focus on single threaded performance. For this, I'd recommend cpubenchmark.net.
Very intuitive site, I don't recommend bouncing between different benchmark sites as they have different formats in terms of how they represent scores.

Let's take the 9950X as an example - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+9950X&id=6211.
Open it up, scroll down to the CPU Test Suite Average Results for AMD Ryzen 9 9950X section and find the last row - Single Thread.

This is what you want to focus on. MOps/Sec stands for Million operations per second. Typically, the consumer Ryzen CPUs excel at having a solid single threaded performance (the newer ones, that is).
Anything below 3,000 MOps/Sec is pretty abysmal, avoid any hardware like that, especially if you're a modded server or a large network.

Ideally you should be shooting for something above the 3,600 MOps/Sec mark.

Intel CPUs

A note on Intel CPUs:

The newer iterations of consumer Intel CPUs do often have solid single threaded performance, but you will often fall victim to their P and E cores:
Intel CPUs have Efficiency cores, and Performance cores. Without direct intervention, you can't control whether your Minecraft server is going to be running on a P or an E core.
If you're on an E core, say goodbye to relatively good performance.

So sure, sometimes an Intel CPU might be appropriate in non performance critical applications (e.g. light minigame servers), but I wouldn't recommend them for heavily modded servers or large networks.

Player Caps / Customize Plan Guides

If any host sets a cap on how many players you plan has, don't use them, full stop.

As for the customize plan, a lot of landing pages on hosting providers will let you input how many players and mods/plugins you will have and recommend a plan.

THESE ARE NOT ACCURATE IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER!!!!. It has NO context of what mods you use (e.g. is it 20 performance mods or 20 mods full of new content?), your server gameplay (i.e. a PvP server without any normal vanilla SMP mechanics will be lighter than an Earth server), etc.

What shared hosts I'd recommend

If you're going low budget, it depends on your region:

• UK - Pebblehost. I've been using them for close to two years, and they've got some of the best panels & quickest support teams I've seen (and no, not the kind of support team that races to respond for that low first-repsonse times that they can brag about, ones that actually provide appropriate solutions in an appropriate space of time). Great budget tier, great premium tier, but their backup system is slow AF (we're talking ~20-30m for creating and restoring 30gb backups). Wouldn't necessarily recommend them in other regions as every other region is just resold OVH.
• NA - EnviroMC. Their budget tier is partly oversold, but their hardware is fantastic for the $1/gb you get.
• EU - Honestly, I might say EnviroMC again, or UltraServers but more on them later (there's a lot to unpack for Ultra, so they get their own section).
• Asia - UltraServers again probably. Asia hosting's a bitch, because everything is expensive. Ultra has appropriate pricing for good hardware.

If you're going medium budget:

• UK - Pebblehost on the Premium plan.
• NA - Bloom Host or EnviroMC Premium. Bloom's cheaper plans are often quite suitable, else EnviroMC's Premium machines are actually quite empty. Big fan of enviro, been using their VPS and Shared services for a while without an issue, plus all their machine stats are openly visible and they've even allowed me to choose what node I want to be moved to on multiple occassions.
• EU - Same as above.
• Asia - This is becoming a pattern, but either Ultra or Bloom. Shit's expensive, man.

For high budget:

• UK - Nothing really "high" budget exists for this, I'd probably say Pebblehost Premium Plan if you're dead set on being in the UK.
• NA - Pufferfish Host. They're pretty pricey, coming in at $2.25-4.00/gb, but they deliver the highest quality hosting experience I've seen from anyone in a long time. Fantastic (in-house!) DDoS mitigation, fantastic panel, top of the line hardware, and a great support team. They're 100% on the spenny end, but it's worth it if you want zero compromise before shifting to a dedicated server.
• EU - Pufferfish Host or the Performance+ Plan of Bloom Host.
• Asia - You can try either Performance+ Plan of Bloom Host or UltraServers again.

If you're just looking to run a private server for friends (where you won't be playing 24/7):
Definitely check out Exaroton.

They're a Pay as You Go (PAYG) Hosting Provider, the same people behind Aternos but with much better hardware. You only pay for the times that you are online - if you're offline, then the server is offline, and you don't get charged.

Definitely ideal for those who don't want to pay an ugly fixed price.

What free hosts I'd recommend

As of right now there's really only one contender, and that's Play Hosting, run by Tubbo.
Granted, you can probably expect at max a few microseconds of uptime every month before the 3 fans that Tubbo points at his rack break down from constant use, but it's a solid free host (no free host is perfect) - you get control over your own files (unlike Aternos) and the hardware isn't actually terrible.

Warning

A note on free hosts, most of them are snake oil. Try to avoid them, people who offer free plans aren't often the most trustworthy hosts/individuals.

Asking for Advice

When you're asking for advice on what host to use, you should outline these factors:

• How many players (at peak times) will you be expecting?
• What region is your server going to be in?
• What is your budget? (this can either be "low/medium/high/doesn't matter" or an actual numerical range)
• What kind of server is this? (e.g. ATM10 server, PvP server, SMP, etc). Show how many mods/plugins you have.
• (Optional) if you have any existing hardware expectations, outline them

Note

A quick note on the 'Show how many mods/plugins you have'. This doesn't let us get a definitive idea of what hardware you will need, it's more relevant on the mod side:
If you have 500 mods it's probably going to be heavier than your average 10-performance-mod survival server.

Likewise, nobody will be able to give you a definitive answer if you ask questions like:

• "will X amount of RAM / CPU threads be able to support N players?", or
• "How much RAM / CPU / Storage do I need to support N players?"

Without any more details, nobody can help you. Anybody who tries to give you an answer without asking followup questions like gameplay beforehand is spitting utter bullshit.

UltraServers.

Where do I begin? There have been so many fucking ups and downs with this host. I'm 99% sure I'm probably breaking a lot of friendships and connections with some of the support team, but I'd rather get this out.

Don't get me wrong, UltraServers has great prices for the hardware they grant you access to, making it often a no-brainer for Asia/SG networks... but god, we've had tons of issues and their support are big fans of pinning issues on other people...

1. Back in the day (late 2025/early 2026), a lot of clients of UniverseSpigot coincidentally also used Ultra, and we (context, I provide support @ USpigot) were getting multiple reports of connection issues to USpigot's servers and extremely slow download speeds on our maven repository. Ultra would pin the issue on us, we found no issues, the only pattern was it was only Ultra customers having the issue, this went round in circles... until the issues magically stopped and we found out it was an issue with one of their upstreams (GSL, iirc)?
2. Ultra support didn't know how to read USpigot sparks, which is completely fair enough, but instead of sending them directly to our support they would sometimes draw incorrect conclusions, which resulted in more back and forth. Granted, respect to Ultra, as we haven't really had any issues on this side over the past few months
3. REALLY weird policies on custom binaries. For context, an unnamed network that uses Ultra's shared hosting in the Asia region (SG, iirc) are pretty large (we're talking 500-1000 CCU during peak times). They can't justify moving off to a dedi purely because of the costs that come with moving to a dedicated server:
   They're a cracked server, so they don't make as much money as a premium 500-1000 CCU peak server would make. Dedis in Asia are expensive as hell, and you have to consider paying for DDoS mitigation (at that scale it will probably run you $50-100+/mo, plus the machine itself (couple hundred bucks a month likely), plus system administration fees, plus offsite backup management, the list goes on.

We wanted to deploy a custom loadbalancing binary on Ultra to help loadbalance players across two proxies, it was a Golang-based binary. They refused to change the startup arg, but seemed to act blissfully unaware when we wrote a 50loc java wrapper to just execute the binary through the JVM instead (extra overhead though). Their reasoning was, because it was a private binary, their development team "couldn't verify the safety of its contents"...

So we decided to test them. We asked, as an alternative, 'Can we use Minekube's Gate Proxy instead?'. Bearing in mind this is a well known, FOSS proxy, also written in Golang, with over 1,100 stars on GitHub. We even said we're aware that they wouldn't be able to provide support and we accept that.
The response? - Same thing, 'The usage of custom software that's proprietary...' (gurl, it's FOSS software)?? '... which cannot be verified by our devops to be safe poses a security risk. The software was reviewed...' (oh, so you DID review it huh?).

But anyways! The past is the past. But do bear this in mind if you're planning to start a network and expand on Ultra.
Ultra, if you want to make a statement or make amendments, you know where to find me <3. I'm happy to make reasonable amendments.

Sparked Host

Just... don't. They're even worse than Ultra.

Three disks in a row failing for a client, CPUs running w/o fans or liquid cooling, CPUs breaking because they were transported improperly, DDoS protection being randomly turned on/off, the list goes on.

Dedicated Hosts

Right off of the bat, avoid ReliableSite, or appropriately dubbed UnReliableSite.
So many clients and friends I have talked to (for instance, arch.mc) have had such horrific experiences with them:

• Terrible networking
• Terrible DDoS mitigation (also really low capacity, back in the day it was like 100gbps, no idea what it is now. Also used to be PATH but they seem to have also swapped, probably wanted to save some money...)
• Some... interesting design / layout choices (see the image below, a snippet of a dedicated server their official Discord account posted in the r/Admincraft Discord...) ... Maybe it was satire or ragebait, but they sure as hell didn't clarify it, actual link to the original message here.
• Terrible cooling
• Undervolting CPUs (case and point, a network purchased an Intel 14900k server that was underclocked to 800MHz (considering the new hardware was considered an upgrade from their previous hardware, they were awfully confused why everything literally went down the shitter).
• Support was very... questionable. To the point that professor (arch.mc owner) actually ended up setting his nickname in the r/Admincraft discord to his ReliableSite support ticket ID purely because he wasn't getting a respone, and there were a few RS people in the Discord at the time - they seem to have cleared out now.

However, Pebblehost does great deals on Dedicated servers (Coventry, UK only) if you want them, oftentimes with a GPU chucked in there optionally too.

Maintaining Dedis

People don't realise the cost of renting and running a dedicated server. You lose out on a lot of luxuries a shared host gives you:

• Offsite Backups (providers like BackBlaze will cost you just under $7/tb/mo)
• Convenience of support from the host, especially with networking and hardware issues. If you have a hardware failure or networking issue while using a dedi, you will be the one going to the provider.
• Especially in this day and age, tons of vulnerabilities (docker escapes, gitlab vulns, Linux vulns, etc) are coming out - you are the one responsible for your machine, and you will be responsible for keeping on top of updating packages and similar.
• A nice intuitive panel installed ready for you. You will be responsible for setting software such as Pterodactyl yourself.
• DDoS protection. Most dedicated hosts won't have the best DDoS mitigation so you'll find yourself paying for additional protection.

Note

At the same time, a lot of the above will often be solved by hiring a system administrator (I recommend https://craftsupport.net/, definitely don't work there! But seriously, the owner of the group handles system administration and is affordable compared to others).
System administrators can run you from xxx/machine/mo or $/hr.

If you can't afford a system administrator and don't have the knowledge to maintain the machine yourself, save it for later mate.

Managed Servers

Some hosts, such as Bloom Host, offer management services (for an additional monthly fee) on their dedicated servers. This is ideal for server owners who aren't necessarily tech savvy or don't want to have to worry about paying a sysadmin every month or hourly.
You won't get any SSH/IPMI access, they will set up the panel for you (in Bloom's case, iirc they will set up their custom panel for you, which is great. Same panel as the one on the shared host, but you get lots more hardware :P)

They can be a bit hit & miss, I've seen a fair few hardware failures (mainly RAM sticks) on Bloom dedis but probably just terribly bad luck. <3 Tamz

Sponsored Hosts

As you run your network, especially as you begin to grow, you will absolutely, 100% without a doubt have people representing hosts (generally shitty smaller summer hosts) pop into your tickets, purely to ask if you want to move to their host for a discount or partnership.

Trust me, don't even entertain these losers. It's not worth the hassle of moving all your files and risking worse performance, networking, panel, yada yada.

Public Plugins - What to use and what to avoid

What to Avoid

Public plugins are a mess right now. Plenty of AI slop plugins and malware going around, to the extent that:

• BuiltByShitBit has banned the term "Donut" in resource titles, and have introduced AI disclosure on resources.
• Modrinth has introduced their own AI Policy that also introduces content disclosure, and also completely prohibits any resources with:
  a) any AI generated content in images/thumbnails
  b) any resources that are primarily/entirely the output of AI

So yeah, avoid plugins like those.
Avoid ANY plugin that promotes itself as an optimizer. At the maximum, ClearLagg is all you will need, but don't add it until you know it's a problem (more on that later).

Do not get me wrong, ClearLagg will work in reducing lag if you have high entity counts (most use it for item clear), but this is a bandaid solution. It does not address the root cause - if you're scheduled item clears are clearing 75,000 items at a time, you should look into why that's happening, and not just clearing it. Maybe it's a player making a stupidly huge farm and their chests are full, you get the idea.

Keep your guard up around plugins that are called "DonutX" (e.g. DonutCore, DonutOptimizer, DonutSpawners). Plugins that advertise themselves as "all in one cores" are generally the worst made.

PREMIUM PLUGINS ARE THE DEVIL - 9 times out of 10, a premium plugin is absolute crap (poor performance, or buggy, or has exploits). There are very few that are actually solid.

WHO to Avoid

First place for this goes towards LinsaFTW. His plugins are laggy, buggy, and he has some of the worst takes I've seen. He has no idea how to read a Spark report (as is obvious from this issue), pull requests into PacketEvents that broke the entire plugin (he PR'd a "fix" into PE when it was in reality an incompatibility that his plugin caused, not the other way around).

An IQ too low?

Also, I'm sorry, but is this graph not AI as helll?

Veloflame generally isn't worth it. Just slap on vanilla Velocity and maybe Sonar if you want it. Same for Flamecord or whatever the bungee derivative was...

Additional notes that have been added since this section was first created (aka. When Linsa first saw it): https://gist.github.com/Skullians/eabc7a16f1ee363e2c608b108baecffa?permalink_comment_id=6358778#gistcomment-6358778

Screenshot in case the comment is "lost":

About my plugins being buggy, I prioritize features over stability and some might break when new features launch. (Its better than stagnated 10 year old plugin with no new features) I get asked more than 3 requests on different projects a day and rn I am working on updates for 20 of my plugins all at the same time (and working on my own servers). Sorry if I miss something, but I handle a lot of plugins and it's easy to have missed something on one.

This is a completely horrific take, and just further emphasises why this section exists.
99% of people are going to prefer stability than sloppy unstable plugins with more features. Take mcMMO, they have a decent update cycle and their stability is solid, you don't see people complaining.
Don't complain about having to maintain 20 plugins all at the same, you made the choice to do that.

Ax Plugins

I need to take a moment to talk about Artillex Studios. This plugin development studio are one of the biggest on its respective plugin platforms, and the level of quality is hard to match/beat... which sucks, because their plugins are so ass when you actually look into them. Most have had their fair share of dupes, and the biggest issue is that each one shades its own version of AxAPI, which is their common utilities library.

Instead of taking a sane approach and having some sort of shared library plugin that they depend on (therefore constituting a single instance of the API being loaded), they took the worst approach and load it individually. Because most of these plugins use packets, each instance of AxAPI injects a new handler into Netty, which just degrades performance as you're adding more handlers to go through.

Additionally, some of their plugins (such as AxSellWands) that use their entity tracker threads are quite heavy on CPU and allocation rate, and because AxAPI is shaded per-plugin, guess what?! The entity tracker threads are ✨ duplicated ✨, therefore further worsening your CPU usage and allocation rate :(

We've already had arguments with the developers and they've shown little to no willingness (correction, any sort of braincells that understand the issues) to resolve these concerns, so my ultimate conclusion is avoid these plugins if possible.

Public Plugins I'd recommend

Rant over, here's some plugins that I'd generally recommend:

Chat Plugin

• Free = LuckPerms Chat or Carbon Chat

Quick note on Carbon Chat, it did have some issues with performance (eating 5-20%+ of the main thread) back in the day at high player counts, so do keep an eye on it.

• Paid = ZelChat

Who I'd avoid for chat plugins

ChatControl. I used this plugin for the better part of 18 mont hs straight. Don't get me wrong, it has TONS of features. A LOT. Channels (global, staff, admin, local/proximity), filters, everything.

But... it's not very performant, and it is NOT user friendly when it comes to configuring it. It's quite intimidating. By all means, if you're willing to risk it... be my guest. However it supports multi-backend networks quite well which is a plus, ZelChat currently has no support for it and requires an external (vibecoded :/) community-maintained addon (premium, who would've guessed the slop is paid called ZelCross.

"Core" Plugins

Generally... everybody (at least when starting out) uses EssentialsX alongside Vault. It handles everything you need - Economy, Vanish, general utilities, but also annoyingly overrides Vanilla Minecraft commands like /tp and /give.

As for Vault mentioned above, it's a dependency that offers a common point for multiple plugins to hook into and manage player economy accounts. EssentialsX provides the economy system through Vault, other plugins you add like ShopGUI+ interact with Vault to get/add/take player balances.

Alternatively, if you want to try something different, give jossentials a shot. Very good developer, well made code.

Who I'd avoid for core plugins

As mentioned earlier, avoid premium plugins advertising themselves as cores or "all-in-one" plugins.
The biggest example of this is CMI.

This plugin has so many features, and yet so many old exploits and dupes. Horribly laggy, generally I wouldn't recommend using them.

Anti Exploit

Pretty much everyone uses LPX, because it works well and doesn't cause performance issues. It doesn't catch every explolit known to man (new ones are always coming out), and LPX is NOT AN ANTI-DUPE PLUGIN, but it helps catch the script kiddies trying to crash your server with commonly-known exploits.

ExploitFixer? Avoid, Yet Another Linsa Plugin, and kind of sucks for perf. Don't think I've ever seen someone get any benefit.

For creative servers, I remember back in the day a lot of people used to use Panilla **see underneath this paragraph, but I'm not sure what everyone uses nowadays, as the original Panilla is no longer maintained (last commit was ~2y ago) - it's OSS, so there's likely a fork or two that have maintained it for more modern versions. Feel free to let me know and I'm happy to review it and make amendments here. There's also NullPointerException made by bestie Santio (HIRE HIM) which is used occassionally by Minehut.

Update, LPX recently added anti-exploit checks for creative servers, so LPX technically solves that too.

Scripting Plugins

Let's start with the root of all evil, Skript.
Don't get me wrong, Skript is useful for making general utilities. Maybe a /discord command, or at max a simple menu (although frankly, just use DeluxeMenus for that...).

But once you start making limiters or actual features, you're screwed. Skript is horribly unperformant, and it will come back to bite you on the ass when you start growing, and realise, "shit, now I have to get these made back into plugins without breaking anything". Case and point a rather large gens server that is trending right now and is at 10tps during peaks due to Skript using 30% or more of the server thread.

If you REALLY want a scripting language to use, use Kite. It's Kotlin Scripting, well made, and isn't as bad.

Moderation Plugins

Dead simple:

• Free - LibertyBans
• Paid (Recommended) - LiteBans

Anticheats

TL;DR? Commercial anticheats are a bunch of snake oil. They all have their pros/cons. Just pick one.

Free Anticheats

I can. without a doubt, say this:
If you want a "decent" free anticheat, use GrimAC. You will encounter performance issues once you reach the mid to high 3-fig playercounts, but for the average server it's fine.
Don't even consider paying the one time price for Vulcan Vulcan't, just use Grim.
Don't consider any random BuiltByShitBit anticheat.

GrimAC (also known as Grim v2) is good enough for starting out until you can look into commercial anticheats.
Granted, I wouldn't recommend it for large scale servers because it will cripple your GC becauase of its alloc rate.

Commercial Anticheats

The three main commercial anticheats are Polar, Astro, and Grim v3. You've also got Vulcan, but it's so unbelievable ass for performance and so bypassable that I won't link it.

I've had experience with Polar/v3/Vulcan, not currently Astro (not like their ridiculous ToS would let me state that I did anyways :P). More actively v3 & Vulcan, Polar is another story.

Note

This section deliberely has no screenshots of chat logs or similar, as I would like to retain the little remaining mutual respect we have...
Additionally, I would like to continue using some of the anticheats listed below. Freedom of speech is a powerful thing boys and girls

Polar Short story, Polar is pretty solid. Not the most affordable commercial anticheat, but strong nontheless.

Pros

• Solid checks
• Some checks are cloud based to offload computation & doesn't require server restarts for new cloud checks

Cons

• Not the most affordable relative to some other commercial anticheats
• Performance not great (particularly main thread usage, netty usage is OK)
• Support is relatively slow
• Limited config (a pattern throughout most commercial anticheats)
• Does not have any entity checks (i.e. no checks for boat fly exploits)

Pro Tip

When using Polar, don't try to be a cheeky little bastard and set a bogus ban command to stop it from auto banning people.
Turns out it's against ToS, we learnt that the hard way - though granted, Shorty was very chill with us as we didn't know.

Long story short, if there was no auto ban then cheaters could just use your server to develop bypasses.

Grim v3

Decent anticheat, little cheaper if you want the lower v3 plan, decent checks, but terrible support.

Pros

• Decent perf, probably the lowest I've seen in terms of CPU and allocation out of the three main commercial ACs.
• Has entity checks (i.e. prevents boat fly exploits)
• Some checks are cloud based to offload computation & doesn't require server restarts for new cloud checks
• Bit cheaper compared to other commercial ACs (last I checked that is, their devs are bipolar pricing model appears to be rather varied.

Cons:
Crap support. Terrible, horrific, wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy.
Scattered in a random GC that you get, usually with Axionize... or if you're lucky, Cotander (the responsive one).

We've had no responses for days to weeks (seems to be a common pattern). If you ain't big enough, don't expect shit from support.
Used to have an issue where Grim would just disable itself after 3 days of the server being online because of some "lease issue". Took the better part of a month to be fixed, not ideal when we have over 27 servers running Grim and we do restarts quite infrequently.

Extra plus, Grim crashes the server if you try tabcomplete the /grim command if it's disabled! *Now fixed.

When we reported a false flag, we were informed that there was a tool that would make it "really easy to debug and fix"... all at the tiny cost of requiring everyone with access to the server files to sign an NDA...

Like, c'mon gurl, why are we signing NDAs so that you can debug and fix an issue in your proprietary software that we are paying you for?
Suffice to say, we told them very politely, n o.

Astro

As I mentioned before, I can't really comment much as I don't have personal experience with the AC, but:
Astro has been in plenty of controversy with a lot of accusations/possible confirmations that it's just skidded Grim v2... I don't think I've seen any relevant proof that confirms this, but their allocation rate definitely matches up LOL

Pros:

• idk, some glaze their checks?
• hey astro, gimme a free license w/o an nda and maybe I'll glaze you

Cons:

• ToS is ass (you will get your license revoked if you mention you use Astro, yada yada)
• Netty allocation rate is the worst I've seen out of all anticheats

Spartan

Just... no...

If you want more details... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibYP8JTl6MU.

The funniest personal experience is when I was looking around the open source Spartan repos and found just a folder with a ton of "dependencies", that had premium plugins like ItemsAdder... (I think he got banned off Polymart for this lol)

He didn't even try to hide it, you can see it in the git history lol

Fair Play This gets an honorary mention for being so goddamn ass (Linsa, of course).

It's literally a glorified hook into every other AC. Linsa argues that his "ML engine" is fast but it's certainly by no means accurate.

See this on Linsa.

TL;DR

• Best Performance? - Grim v3 > Polar > Astro
• Affordability? - Grim v3 > Polar > Astro
• Check Quality? - Grim v3 = Polar > Astro
• Support? - Polar > Astro > Grim v3 (Astro support is reportedly alright but you do have to sign an NDA usually to get any issue fixed so there's that)

DDoS Protection Providers

This is another pretty deep rabbit hole. There's several options when it comes to DDoS mitigation, and it's pretty intimidating.
Let's start with the trendy one:

DonutShield

DonutShield is DonutSMP's proprietary DDoS mitigation service, which they have recently began offering commercially to other networks.
This mitigation provider is used by some of the biggest networks, including Wynncraft, Hoplite, and my personal favourite, SunnySMP.

It's a hybrid of both Cloudflare Spectrum and their own custom filters - it supports both Java and Bedrock, and has support for both Simple Voice Chat and Votifier.

I have no idea what's with most DDoS mitigation providers, but half of them have no support for Votifier, which sucks because it means we have to pay for a tiny VPS to forward vote requests over Redis or similar... just a pain in the ass.

Pros:

• Some of the best filters and very high capacity
• Supports Java & Bedrock + SVC & Votifier
• Has support for proxy loadbalancing w/ HAProxy

Cons

• Less affordable compared to other alternatives. Starts @ $100/mo for 10TB/mo bandwidth, costs extra once you go past that.
• Support is very slow, typically handled through DMs w/ Nathan. There is a support discord but very few people ever get invited there for some reason...? Kind of the same as Grim v3... if you ain't big enough, don't expect shit.
• Panel is pure vibes
• Weird issues with disconnections, SVC incompatibilities, etc
• Apparently their "extra" regions (e.g. India) cost more? I've seen Nathan quote $175/mo base for someone looking for an India PoP (see below)...

Todo - cosmic (ew)/arvoris (ew)/tcp/papyrus.vip (not the charity)

Server Software

Server Software is yet another (rather overwhelming) rabbit hole.
Quick reminder, this section is targeted towards server owners aiming to run a network on Paper servers or similar, modded server owners will not be covered for now.

Warning

I am affiliated with UniverseSpigot, a high-performance software fork. I provide support, and work on servers who are clients of UniverseSpigot.
Regardless, I will still write this section without any bias or preferential treatment, however please do bear this in mind.

Tip

Some basic terminology you will find useful:

• Fork - When you hear someone describing server software as a "fork of x", e.g. "Purpur is a fork of Paper", it means the software is based on Paper (known as the "upstream"), and the "upstream"/Paper code is inherited (and possibly modified) by the fork. Likewise, if a server software is a fork of Purpur, which is a fork of Paper, then it inherits (and possibly modifies) Paper and Purpur's code. An issue with forks is that they are based on a "commit" (a sort of snapshot) of the upstream's code, so the fork has to constantly update their upstream commit.
• Patches - When server software like Paper and Purpur make changes to the base Minecraft server, it is done in the form of a "patch". These "patches" are targeted code changes on top of the original decompiled Minecraft source (to fix bugs, add performance, or new features).

The following section is just a brief overview of the current ecosystem of plugin-based server software.

Paper and its history

The average server owner uses Paper (reminder we are not talking about modded server owners for now), which is a high-performance, open-source server software that provides the base API for plugins, which allow developers to add their own features and functionality (this is what plugins like EssentialsX are using).

However, Paper wasn't the first original server software that provided this base plugin API. Between roughly 2010-2014, there was Bukkit/CraftBukkit, abbreviated to CB for CraftBukkit, which was the (original) standard for Minecraft servers running plugins. However, in ~2014, CB was hit by legal action and disputes due to code licensing issues with Mojang, and pretty much colapsed.

Spigot, which has existed since 2012, is a fork of CB to add performance tweaks, and pretty much became the new standard after CB got nuked, and was very heavy on its backwards compatibility (this is why parts of the API are so incredibly old and deprecated, but still haven't been removed. It's why plugins that haven't been updated in 2-3 years can still work on latest versions).

And then finally, Paper came out in 2016, as a fork of Spigot, mainly due to frustrations with Spigot's lack of desire to add performance patches.

However, forking Spigot introduced an annoying bottleneck. The development of Spigot updates (to snapshots and pre-releases) were done privately, and only released openly once the latest Minecraft version actually released. This meant Paper had to wait for the release to do their update, which is well into the 6 figures of lines of code, so server owners were often waiting weeks for Paper to come out with their initial (typically experimental/alpha) builds for the latest version.

the hard fork

Eventually Paper took the jump and hard-forked from Spigot. This means they no longer used Spigot as an upstream, and Paper then became its own independent project, based off of the latest Spigot code at the time, and now maintain and update it all themselves. This allows them to release updated builds quicker.

Paper still has the old Bukkit/Spigot plugin API, but also has its own modern API that the newer plugins use nowadays - this is why older Spigot plugins still work on Paper due to the compatibility layer.

to this day

And here we are, and Paper is now the most widely used server software (for plugin-based servers) in the world - with combined server/player counts in the six figures.

What server software should I use?

Running Minecraft servers/networks is hard, and choosing a server software to use is difficult too.

Generally, you will always start with Paper, ideally with the latest stable version of Paper. If you're using Spigot... just switch to Paper mate... what are you doing?

Pros

• ✅ Stable
• ✅ Performance boost over regular Minecraft (and Spigot)
• ✅ All (specifically Paper) plugins are built to support Paper, so you should not have an issue with incompatibilities on Paper (this changes with some software forks)
• ✅ Solid support discord
• ✅ Much more configurable

Cons

• ❌ No support if you are not running Paper (this is reasonable, but do bear it in mind)
• ❌ Bugs from Paper itself (albeit rare) do take a while to resolve (they are a team of developers, not a company dedicated towards the software, they have lives and other higher priority things to attend to)
• ❌ Often break intricate Vanilla mechanics. This affects like 0.0000000000000001% of all users, we are talking about the fine intricate Vanilla mechanics (typically with redstone machines), plus plugins and the configuration set by the server owner will influence Vanilla mechanics. This isn't really Paper's fault, but if you're looking for absolute zero-compromise vanilla mechanics, then you're looking at something like a modded Fabric/Forge server instead... so good luck :) Realistically, this isn't something to worry about. You will rarely get someone complaining about vanilla mechanics unless they're trying to make unreasonably complicated redstone machines or similar. You're not the first person to make the compromise, and you won't be the last.

Purpur

One of the well known forks of Paper is Purpur. Purpur aims to bring in more features and customization into Paper, with commands like /tpsbar and /rambar, and features like larger ender chests, plus their own optional API (however you don't find many plugins integrating into this API, Purpur-specific plugins are VERY rare).

They're a solid team - if you're looking for specific feature(s) and want to save some time looking for plugins, check Purpur's Configuration documentation to see if they have what you're looking for.

Pros

• ✅ Stable - they don't add any weird performance or game-breaking patches
• ✅ More configuration/commands/features compared to base Paper

Cons

• ❌ Fork of Paper, requires Purpur to update upstream. However, it's only a single upstream, it becomes more problematic and more time consuming when it becomes a fork of a fork of a fork, etc, so this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

My server is lagging! What do I do?

Warning

This is only AFTER you have exhausted the appropriate options in . Changing server software can sometimes be a hassle and should be something you do last, especially if you decide to move to some of the software listed below.

There are forks of Paper (and forks of other forks of Paper, you get the gist) that do focus on improving performance. Paper doesn't regularly merge performance patches, so there are other forks that focus entirely on the principle of adding performance patches. These forks are either private/paid or open-source/free.

Pufferfish

Pufferfish was one of the bigger & trustworthy performance-oriented server software forks. Again, it was based on Paper.
However, Kevin (the developer/maintainer of the software) wasn't interested in the huge amount of effort that went into maintaining the software, so the project is inactive, and only supports various versions up to 1.21.10. If you're willing to take the risk (backported exploit fixes or newer content will be absent), then feel free to go for it. But most Pufferfish users have migrated off by now.

Pros

• ✅ Stable performance patches

Cons

• ❌ No longer maintained, only supports certain versions up to 1.21.10 (the site says 1.21.8 but if you look in the build commit messages it does say up to 1.21.10)

Leaf

Leaf is probably the most well-known free and open-source high-performance server software. It's a fork of Paper, but they do pull patches from other forks, including Purpur.

Warning

Leaf... isn't the most stable thing in the world.

Don't get me wrong. Leaf will improve your performance a decent amount. It's actively maintained, and hell, I give my hats off to them for doing good work.
But at the same time, there are multiple instances of Leaf merging untested performance patches, or "performance" patches that are actually degrading performance.

It has come to the point where multiple plugins (Via plugins, EssentialsX, and smaller ones like EzChestShopReborn) have explicitly stated they do not support Leaf, and they have been called out for these performance degredations:

Granted, they have made a ton of fixes, plus they seem to have started cutting back on the amount of sketchy shit you're doing. But generally, if you're encountering weird af issues, just move off to Paper or Purpur temporarily and see if it fixes your issue.

TODO - this section is not finished yet!

Fixing Server Lag

TODO