Trixi-D

Hey everyone! I’m kinda stuck figuring out which host to go with for me and my IRL Minecraft crew. We’re a group of 15+ friends/coworkers who play a bunch of different modes (survival, creative, RP, horror etc) and usually have like3-5 servers up that we play depending on the vibe. Until now, I’ve been hosting everything on my own PC bc it's pretty beefy w/ good internet, so I kept it running 24/7. But since I started a new job, I’m barely home and can’t be the one restarting/debugging every time something crashes. So yeah after talking with my group, I think it's better to just to pay for a host and save myself the concerns. Based on our research we have a few finalists: ShockByte Most of the group picked ShockByte as a top choice bc they're very well known, have good pricing and say they use high end hardware. But I saw in their FAQ it says "up to AMD Ryzen 9 7950X – 5.70GHz". OK... like what does “up to” mean? Am I maybe not getting the 7950X? Or not 5.7GHz? Bit confusing. Still the DDR5 and Gen 4 NVMe setup is also what I have at home and it's very good. I'm just wondering if their 5GB plan (at $16/mo) can handle a pretty mod-heavy Spigot setup with 15 players on at the same time. Seems fair-ish when compared to Nitrado, which is way more for a similar config. That being said... Shockbyte has a lot of bad reviews floating around. Also, I sent support a question 3 days ago and still nothing back. That kinda makes me nervous tbh. Anyone here used them recently? Are they actually okay or should I steer clear? LumaBlast Honestly, this one looks almost perfect. Similar (if not better?) hardware as ShockByte. They also have their own datacenter in Bucharest (where most of us are based), and we're getting pings under 15ms which is amazing (i tested with the ping widget thingy on the website). Their 4GB RAM plan is only $10/mo ($8 if we pay annually) and that’s literally half of what ShockByte charges... How?. I’ve also hit up their support 3 times to confirm these things and always got a reply in like less than 2–3 minutes. Really good first impressions BUT… They’re brand new. Like, they just launched two months ago. It says on their about page that they’re made by the same people behind LifeInCloud (a cloud/managed services company from 2009) and I did check their site/socials and they seem pretty legit. They also have another thing called LumaDock that offers VPS and one of my friends suggested we go that route + add a panel... but I’m not great with Linux and commands, so I need something more plug-and-play. So no VPS. Anyway I’m very tempted to go with them just for the price and ping alone, especially since I wanna host more servers in the future. But yeah, being so new makes me a bit unsure. Anyone here tried LumaBlast yet? Anything I should be careful of? Or should I just try and refund if it feels off? G-portal So this one I’m confused about. Some people on reddit said you can rent servers for less than 30 days, like daily or weekly, but I don’t see that option on the site? Only shows 30 days for $11.41 (for 4GB). That’s more than LumaBlast but less than ShockByte. Daily pricing would be cool for us cause sometimes we just wanna run a creative world for like a week, then maybe a PVP map for 3 days etc etc. If anyone knows how to activate that short-term rental stuff on G-portal I’d love to know. Do i need to setup an account first or go to another page? Also how is their control panel, lag, customer support? Nitrado We were also looking into Nitrado cause they seem pretty reputable, but holy $$$! I set up a 5GB server (they don’t even offer 4GB?) with 16 slots, 30 days..... came to $36. What?? Did I mess something up in the config? Why are they 2–3x more expensive than other hosts? Also the whole “slots” thing is weird. Is that player count or performance cap or what? However, we're still considering them because they have good reviews and many peopl recommended them on reddit (as opposed to ShockByte reviews which people complained about support and incosnistent performance, however Shockbyte is like half the price!) So yeah, that’s where we’re at. If anyone has experience with any of these providers or knows of other good/cheap hosts in Eastern Europe (like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ukraine etc) would really appreciate your input. THANKS in advance!❤️