Comparison
If your server sits empty most of the week, paying for a flat month is paying for silence. These are the hosts that bill by use instead. One of them is ours, and we say so where it matters.
Every host on this page meters compute: the server bills while it runs and stops billing when it stops. The models differ in the details. Some count seconds, some minutes, some sell preset tiers by the hour. The number that matters is what an hour of your server size costs, and what the meter reads on a night nobody plays.
There are always two numbers, not one. Runtime is the meter; storage is the standing cost of keeping your world on disk between sessions. A fair comparison looks at both, plus two edge cases that decide whether the model is safe: what happens when your balance hits zero, and where your backups live.
All prices and policies below come from each host's public pages as of August 2026. Details change; verify before you commit. VoxelRun runs this site, and its card gets the same treatment as the rest.
The pioneer of credit-based Minecraft hosting, by the Aternos team.
Per-second billing with a monthly cap and a permanent free tier.
A veteran host that ranks for pay-as-you-go searches but sells flat months.
A newer entrant billing preset server tiers by the minute.
Ours. Per-minute billing with a monthly cap, on our own EU bare metal.
Metered hosts all charge something to keep your world on disk while the server sleeps. exaroton nets it against your usage up to 10 credits a month but caps every server at 10 GB. PowerupStack charges about 10 credits per GB monthly with backups included. pixly.gg charges a small unspecified fee while asleep. VoxelRun gives the first 10 GB free and bills only the space above. For a vanilla world any of these is cheap; for a 40 GB modpack world, the cap and the rates start to decide.
This is the sharpest difference on the page. exaroton's own documentation makes keeping your world backed up your responsibility, and servers do not survive an empty account forever. VoxelRun archives the server in place with a final snapshot and restores it in one click after a top-up. If you tend to forget top-ups, weigh this heavily; the cheapest host is expensive the day it deletes a year-old world.
Pure metering has a failure mode: a month where the server runs constantly can cost more than a flat plan would have. Two hosts here answer it. PowerupStack caps compute at your tier's monthly price. VoxelRun caps each server's compute spend below the always-on price. exaroton and pixly.gg meter without a ceiling, which is fine for light use and worth knowing about before a summer holiday.
PowerupStack manages seven daily backups on their side. VoxelRun stores free backups on its own EU object storage for 30 days. exaroton exports to your personal cloud drive and disclaims durability. pixly.gg publishes little about backups. A backup the host manages on separate storage is the difference between an incident and an anecdote; ask this question of any host you shortlist.
Start from your calendar, not from feature lists. Count the hours your server actually ran last month. Under about 100 hours, any metered host beats a flat plan on price, and the deciding factors become storage size, zero-balance behavior, and backups. Over 300 hours, flat-rate hosting or a capped metered host is the honest answer, because a meter without a ceiling stops being cheap exactly when your group gets active.
A worked example: a group that plays two evenings a week, three hours each, runs about 26 hours a month. On VoxelRun an 8 GB server costs about €1 of compute for those hours, plus storage above the free 10 GB. The same pattern on a typical flat 8 GB plan costs €20 to €30 a month regardless of the empty nights. That gap, multiplied by a year, is what this whole category exists for.
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