Knowledgebase

A VPS, or virtual private server, may look intimidating at first, but it is actually quite easy. In this guide, we will be showing you how to create your own Minecraft server hosted on your VPS. This guide will be considering you play Minecraft: Java Edition. This guide assumes that you use `Ubuntu 20.04` as your VPS operating system.

Step 1: Acquire Your VPS

If you are going to have less than 5 players on your Minecraft server at a time, then the Starter VPS plan (2GB RAM) should be sufficient for you. However, if you have more players follow the chart below:

Of course, these ratios are our recommendations, and we highly recommend you do your own research as well, as factors such as plugins and world sizes will need to be taken into account too. Of course, if you need a more powerful VPS, we can do so. We can create VPS up to 96GB RAM.

Once you purchase your VPS, your login credentials will be emailed to you. We highly recommend you checkout FloofyVPScp™ (vps.floofyhosting.com). Be sure to check your spam folder if you haven’t received the email!

Step 2: Logging Into Your VPS

Logging in to your VPS is simple. You should be emailed your VPS IP and root password, which is all you need to login! Simply open up your terminal on your computer (For Windows, type "cmd" into Windows Search, and if you use Mac type "Terminal" in Spotlight Search), and run the following command, assuming your VPS IP as "8.8.8.8" and root password as "password":

ssh [email protected]

Once the password prompt comes up, paste your password using right click (yes on the mouse). The characters will not show up, but they will still be inputted.

You are now logged in to your VPS! We encourage you to follow the following command to make sure that your VPS is up to date before we start. It might take a few minutes to run.

apt update && apt upgrade -y

Step 3: Installing Java

Minecraft needs Java to run, as that is the programming language it is written in. Installing Java is especially easy on Linux. Depending on the desired Minecraft version, you will need a different version of Java:

Minecraft 1.8.x:

apt install openjdk-8-jdk

Minecraft 1.16.x:

apt install openjdk-11-jdk

If you need help changing Java versions, don’t hesitate to ask our 24/7 support team!

Step 4: Downloading Minecraft

We need to download the Minecraft JAR file, but first, let’s create a directory that Minecraft can run in.

cd

mkdir minecraft

cd minecraft

Now let’s download the JAR file for Minecraft:

Paper 1.16.5:

wget https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/1.16.5/builds/731/downloads/paper-1.16.5-731.jar -O server.jar

Paper 1.8.8:

wget https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/1.8.8/builds/443/downloads/paper-1.8.8-443.jar -O server.jar

You can get all the downloads from papermc.io.

Now, simply run Minecraft with java -jar server.jar. In the near future, we will update this guide to include the links to our own, faster, more reliable CDN where you can download all the JARs, and explain how to setup Screen.