exaroton alternative
exaroton pioneered pay-per-use Minecraft hosting and does a lot right. VoxelRun follows the same idea with a different promise: an empty wallet never costs you your world, backups live on our storage instead of yours, and your files are always reachable.
If you are comparing the two, you already like paying for play time instead of a flat month. The models are close: a credit wallet, per-GB-RAM runtime billing, a stopped server that costs almost nothing. The differences show up at the edges — what happens when credits run out, who is responsible for backups, how you get at your files, and how storage grows with a modpack world. This page walks through those honestly, including the places where exaroton is ahead.
| Area | VoxelRun | exaroton |
|---|---|---|
| Billing model | Credit wallet, billed per minute of runtime per GB of RAM. Stopped compute is never billed. | Credit wallet, billed per second of runtime per GB of RAM. The same basic idea. |
| Monthly cost cap | Yes. Once a server's compute spend reaches its monthly cap — set below the always-on price — running it is free until month end. Pay-per-use, never more than a flat-rate host. | No ceiling — pay-per-use billing runs for as long as the server does. |
| When credits run out | The server is archived in place: the world is snapshotted to our object storage and the server card stays in your panel with one-click restore. | Their documentation is clear that keeping your world saved is your job; servers do not survive an empty account indefinitely. |
| Backups | Free, one click, stored on our EU object storage with 30-day retention — plus a final automatic snapshot before any zero-balance stop. | Backups go to your own Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox, and durability is explicitly disclaimed. |
| File access | Full web file manager with streamed multi-GB uploads and downloads, plus SFTP — even while the server is stopped. | Web editor only. No FTP or SFTP, and web uploads are capped at 3 GB. |
| Storage | Elastic 10–100 GB per server; the first 10 GB are free and only space above that bills per GB per month. | 10 GB per server, fixed. Large modpack worlds have to be pruned to fit. |
| Sharing with friends | Per-member permissions from start/stop only up to full access, with an audit trail. Runtime is always paid by the owner's wallet. | Server sharing exists and friends can operate the server; a Discord bot can even start it without an account. |
| Regions | EU only, on our own bare metal. | EU and North America. If your group plays from NA, this matters. |
| Ecosystem | Free HTTPS subdomains for Dynmap/BlueMap, granular sharing, elastic storage. | Public API with official clients, Discord bot, first-class proxy support. A more mature ecosystem today. |
Both hosts charge for the hours your group actually plays, so neither punishes a quiet month. Where they part ways is responsibility for your data. exaroton's design pushes world safety onto you: backups leave for your personal cloud drive, and their own help pages tell you that keeping the world saved is your task. VoxelRun takes the opposite position — the platform is responsible for not losing your world, even when your wallet is empty.
Running out of credits is the most common failure mode of any pay-per-use host — life happens, a month goes by, nobody topped up. On VoxelRun that scenario is boring by design: the server stops, the world is snapshotted to object storage, and the server stays in your panel waiting for a one-click restore after you top up. Nothing to re-upload, nothing to reconfigure, no countdown to deletion of the world itself.
A backup that lives in your own Google Drive is better than no backup, but it makes the host's durability your problem, and it caps how the host can help you when something goes wrong. VoxelRun backups are one click, free, stored on EU object storage with 30-day retention, and downloadable as a plain zip whenever you want to leave. Data portability is a feature, not a threat.
Modpack servers live and die by file access: a 15 GB world, an oversized mods folder, a config that needs one line changed. With no FTP/SFTP and a 3 GB web upload cap, exaroton makes the big cases painful. VoxelRun ships a full web file manager with streamed multi-GB transfers plus real SFTP, both usable even while the server is stopped — and storage grows to 100 GB when the world does.
Honesty cuts both ways. exaroton offers North American locations; VoxelRun is EU-only today. They have a public API with official client libraries, a Discord bot that can start the server for guild members without an account, and first-class proxy support for networks. If those are the features your group leans on, exaroton is currently the stronger pick — several of them are on our roadmap, but they are not live.
Choose by failure mode, not by feature list. If your group needs NA latency or lives in Discord-bot workflows, exaroton fits today. If what you care about is that an empty wallet, a busy semester, or a forgotten top-up can never cost you the world — and that your files and backups stay in your hands — that is exactly the case VoxelRun is built around.
exaroton and VoxelRun agree on the big idea: pay for play time, not for idle months. exaroton brings NA regions, a public API, and a Discord bot. VoxelRun answers the model's weakest moment — zero credits — with archive instead of delete, keeps backups on its own storage instead of yours, and gives full file access with elastic storage. If data safety at the edges decides it, that is our side of the table.
Ready when you are
Sign up, confirm your email, use your free credits, and start a server from the dashboard.