Make your Minecraft server 24/7

Why 24/7 matters

A server that only runs while you play is really just your world with guests. Friends in other time zones, the one who plays after school, the one who plays at 2 am — they all need the server to be there without you.

One common misunderstanding: farms do not keep producing while nobody is online. Chunks only tick near players (or with chunk loaders from mods). What 24/7 gives you is access, not progress.

Option 1: Keep a home PC running

It works, with trade-offs.

What you need to set up:

Turn off sleep and hibernation in your power settings, including “turn off hard disks”.
Start the server automatically after a reboot: a start script in the Windows startup folder, a scheduled task, or a systemd service on Linux.
Disable automatic restarts for updates at bad times, or at least schedule them.
Give the PC a fixed local IP so port forwarding keeps working after a router restart.
Port forwarding for TCP 25565 (and UDP 19132 for Bedrock or Geyser). See port forwarding vs hosting.

What it costs you:

Electricity. A desktop running around the clock adds up on your bill, even if the server itself is small.
Noise and heat in the room where it runs.
Your home IP is visible to every player.
Your upload bandwidth is shared with everything else at home. When someone streams or uploads, players lag.
Your PC is busy. Gaming on the same machine takes CPU from the server.

A spare old laptop or mini PC is a better home server than your gaming PC, as long as it has enough RAM.

Option 2: A hosted server

A host runs the server in a data centre. No PC at home, no port forwarding, no electricity bill, and the address stays the same. You pay a monthly price instead. On ShulkerHost the smallest plan starts at 2 GB RAM — see plans and prices.

Restart when it crashes

Every server crashes eventually: a plugin bug, a memory spike, a corrupted chunk. 24/7 means it comes back on its own.

At home: use a start script that restarts in a loop. A simple Windows batch file:
```
:start
java -Xms4G -Xmx4G -jar server.jar nogui
timeout /t 10
goto start
```
On Linux, a systemd service with Restart=on-failure does the same.
Hosted: most panels restart a crashed server automatically or let you turn that on.

Schedule a daily restart

A restart once a day clears memory that plugins and mods leak over time. Pick a quiet hour, warn players with a message a few minutes before, then restart. Many hosts have scheduled tasks for this; at home a scheduled task or cron job does it.

Backups you do not have to remember

A server that runs all the time changes all the time, so backups have to be automatic. Once a day at minimum, plus one before every update. Keep a few days of history. The details are in backups and restores.

Keep performance steady over weeks

Servers that run for months slowly get slower: more chunks explored, more farms built, more entities.

Pre-generate the world and set a world border so exploration does not generate new chunks during play.
Watch TPS and MSPT once a week with /tps or spark.
Clean up old farms and dropped item piles.

If lag creeps in, work through fix lag: TPS and MSPT explained.

Checklist

Server starts by itself after a reboot or crash.
Daily restart at a quiet hour.
Automatic daily backups, stored off the server.
Whitelist on, since the server is reachable at all times.
A way to see the console from your phone (SSH app, or your host’s panel) for quick fixes.