Large Scale Minecraft Servers
When launching a large scale Minecraft server, what are some good practices for ensuring stability? What are some tips that you wish that you had known when you launched your first large scale Minecraft server? I'm launching my first large scale survival server soon and I want to ensure that our Grand Release goes smoothly. I have optimized my server to the best of my ability and I have thoroughly tested every aspect of the server apart from a few features that will be thoroughly tested during our private beta.
I am using a dedicated server to host our website and pterodactyl panel. I am using the latest Paper 1.21.1 build and we allow java players to connect using 1.21.1 - 1.21.4. The server mainly consists of one paper instance, but we have a dual proxy setup for our event server and so that players can join the server through MineHut's external hosting feature. We have pre generated our world.
Is there anything that you had to learn the hard way after you launched a server?
20 Replies
After first launched a server at these scales, you should note that there's always at least a bug or an error thats happen to some players or the whole server generally.
So be prepared to all of these circumstances post-launch and have a great skill at fast troubleshooting and resolving player's problems.
You would have to had some staff behind the scene to monitor the server and the players
And always keep an eye on MSPT/TPS during or off the peak hour, regularly check the spark reports, all while keep the uptime as close as 99.99% as possible for better experience to the players
Thats all of my advices
That's some great advice, thank you for that
If you’re over 700 players I’d recommend world sharding or folia, that should fix most lag issues
or even better, buy a copy of USpigot and you should be mostly fine
Multiple proxies preferably multiple regions, if you want stability it’s better off buying 2 smaller dedis then 1x powerful one
Don’t cheap out on hosting or network, if you have big budget go with data packet, try to not host on OVH or budget providers ñ
And get ddos/crash/bot/hack/etc protection
I’d also suggest separating the website from the main server
If u can’t afford separate hosting at least vm it and setup killers in case resource usage goes high
So many servers have excelent Minecraft ddos protection only to get taken offline for hours because a small website flood overwhelmed their cpu
cloudflare pages is free for 1 million requests a month, that should be a good option
Unless it’s like xenforo or smith
and I’m p sure it’s for more than 1m requests
We get ddos es all the time
Our pages have like 500m monthly requests
It's best to instrument the heck out of your server anyways. Iirc unifiedmetrics is the current best way to do this: https://docs.cubxity.dev/docs/unifiedmetrics/intro
If anyone else knows of anything better, please chime in.
Introduction | Cubxity's Docs
UnifiedMetrics is a fully-featured free and open-source metrics collection plugin for Minecraft servers.
Do you have any recommendations for protection?
We host our website through Vercel and they offer DDoS Mitigation, but that's nice to know
We use a plugin called Plan / Player Analytics that looks very similar to UnifiedMetrics
We're not expecting nearly that many players, but thank you
plan is pretty heavy at higher player counts
pretty sure they charge for the bandwidth used during attacks
nvm
Does anyone do that?!
What’s the point of DDoS protection if you’re getting charged for illegitimate traffic
Vercel may charge for a accidental server loop, but i think you can just contact them to void it
In what area?
I just mean in general, there are a ton of options available for every type of protection, so I wanted to know if there was anything that you would explicitly recommend
Ok
1s
Where do you plan to have servers at?
Eu or Na?
For DDoS depends on your budget and location, id obviously recommend my own for most cases, for Crash Protection LPX is #1 plugin right now, also some proxies do have anticrash on the bungee side (but you will probably want to run velocity), for bot protection most mc-specific ddos protection services should cover it, if not (or you have issues with bypass bots which for premium servers is not likely) then xCord or limbofilter should do the trick, for cheat protection polar is #1 right now and hack protection well just hire some sysadmins, check everything, make sure there are no vulns everything is firewalled updated, use 2FA, dont give staff more perms than they need to, etc
Based on the doc i get the vibe their protection is not great, this is fine if you dont pay per usage as afaik vercel is like cloudflare pages/workers where the site is served on their edge infra, but if you do pay for usage then be careful as a ddos attack may make you have to pay $30000
actually nvm, its just not explaijning in depth at all, looking into it they do TLS fingerprinting and JS PoW's
Awesome, thanks for the insight!