Fair use

What you are buying

Budget plans use shared fair use CPU and are built for vanilla and light private servers. Heavy modpacks, public servers and performance sensitive games are set up by us for each order rather than sold as a self-serve plan.

Memory is the thing each plan is cut by, and it is guaranteed: a four gigabyte plan gets four gigabytes. Processor time is shared with other servers on the same node, and that is the trade that makes these prices possible.

What that means in practice

For the self-serve games, at the player counts each plan states, running vanilla or a light plugin set, you will not notice. Those are the conditions the sizes were chosen for.

• A vanilla or lightly modded server, sized correctly, is fine
• A large modpack will want more processor than this tier gives you
• A public server takes traffic we have not sized for and is not offered
• Games that need more than the budget node are set up by us for each order, and each game page says so

If your server outgrows the plan

We are not going to promise you dedicated cores and then quietly throttle you. If your server starts affecting other people on the node, we will contact you and talk about a bigger plan.

Silent throttling is the normal practice in this market and it is why people distrust budget hosting. You should be able to tell the difference between a server that is busy and a server that is being held back, and the only way to guarantee that is to say something.

What we will not do

We will not cap your performance without telling you, we will not bill you for an upgrade you did not agree to, and we will not suspend a server for load without contacting you first. Abuse is handled under the acceptable use policy and is a separate matter from simply outgrowing a plan.

Games we set up by hand

Some games are not a one click install: they run under Wine, need a Steam account that owns the game, or are heavy enough that a person has to size them. Those are marked set up by us in the catalogue. You order them like any other server, one of us builds it and checks it, and the same fair use terms apply once it is running.