PebbleHost alternative
PebbleHost's Budget tier is about the cheapest flat Minecraft hosting there is, and its Premium tier adds serious hardware and hourly backups. VoxelRun charges by the running hour instead, with one tier and nothing held back from it.
PebbleHost splits its Minecraft hosting into two products. Budget starts at a dollar per GB on older hardware, and Premium moves you to Ryzen 9 machines with DDR5, bigger DDoS protection, and notably good backups: daily snapshots plus hourly incrementals. It is an honest structure, and the Premium backup story is one of the better ones in flat-rate hosting. VoxelRun takes a different shape entirely. There is one tier, it runs on our own Ryzen 9 bare metal, backups are free on every server, and the bill is metered per running hour rather than per month.
| Area | VoxelRun | PebbleHost |
|---|---|---|
| Best reason to choose it | Session play with a bill that follows the hours, on one tier with everything included. | The cheapest way to keep a server up 24/7, with an upgrade path to strong hardware and hourly backups. |
| Price model | Pay as you go. About €0.04 per running hour for an 8 GB server, plus its disk. Stopped compute is not billed. | Flat monthly tiers: Budget from $1 per GB as of August 2026, Premium priced above it via their configurator. |
| Monthly cost cap | Yes. Compute billing stops at a cap set below the always-on price. | The flat plan price is the ceiling. |
| Paying while nobody plays | Stopped servers bill no compute. Wake-on-join starts the server when a player connects. | All hours are included in the monthly price, empty or not. |
| Hardware | One tier: our own AMD Ryzen 9 bare metal with NVMe in the EU, 2 to 32 GB RAM as a hard limit. | Budget runs Ryzen 7 5700X with DDR4; Premium runs Ryzen 9 9900X with DDR5. The tier you pay for decides the hardware. |
| Backups | Free on every server: one-click exports to EU object storage with 30-day retention, plus an automatic snapshot before any zero-balance stop. | Premium includes free daily backups and hourly incrementals, a genuinely strong setup. Budget's backup provisions are thinner; check current terms. |
| Modpacks | Automatic install from the pack author's server files, with measured per-pack RAM recommendations. | One-click installer advertising 12,000 modpacks, on both tiers. |
| Moving an existing server | The migration importer pulls your world directly from PebbleHost over SFTP or FTP. | Standard SFTP access lets you download and move your world by hand. |
| Best fit | Groups that play in sessions and want full hardware and backups without picking a tier. | Budget for cheap always-on servers; Premium for busy communities that want top hardware and hourly backups. |
A dollar per GB is about as cheap as flat Minecraft hosting gets, and if you need a server up around the clock on a small budget, PebbleHost Budget is a rational pick. Premium is a different product for a different customer: strong single-thread hardware and hourly incremental backups for communities where losing an afternoon of progress actually hurts.
If your server idles most of the week, the flat month is mostly paying for silence, even at a dollar per GB. Per-hour billing charges for sessions and nothing else, wake-on-join removes the ritual of starting the server before friends arrive, and the monthly cap keeps a heavy month bounded. One tier means the hardware and backup questions disappear; every server gets the same Ryzen 9 metal and the same backups.
Credit where due: hourly incremental backups on PebbleHost Premium are better granularity than VoxelRun offers today. Our model is different: free one-click backups on every server with 30-day retention on separate EU object storage, an automatic snapshot before any zero-balance stop, and archive-in-place instead of deletion if your wallet empties. Theirs is finer-grained on Premium; ours is included everywhere and tied to a promise that your world survives an empty account.
PebbleHost's split means the advertised dollar-per-GB price and the headline features live on different tiers. The strong hardware and hourly backups belong to Premium, whose per-GB price sits behind their configurator. VoxelRun has one tier. The Ryzen 9 hardware, the free backups, the cap, and wake-on-join are not upsells; the only variables are RAM size and hours played.
An 8 GB Budget plan is roughly $8 a month, likely the cheapest flat 8 GB on the market. The same size on VoxelRun at 25 session hours costs about a euro of compute plus storage above the free 10 GB. For always-on use, Budget's flat price is genuinely hard to beat and this page says so. The question is only whether your server is actually on.
PebbleHost rewards commitment: pick the right tier and run it constantly, and the value is real. VoxelRun rewards honesty about your calendar: if the server would sit empty most nights, pay for the evenings it is not. Cheap flat hosting and metered hosting each have a customer, and knowing which one you are decides this page.
PebbleHost offers the cheapest flat entry point in this series and, on Premium, a backup cadence that beats most of the market. VoxelRun answers with one tier where nothing is gated: Ryzen 9 bare metal, free 30-day backups on every server, per-hour billing with a cap, and wake-on-join. Always-on on a budget points to PebbleHost; session play points here.
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