Shared Minecraft hosting throttles your server when the node gets busy. VPS hosting charges for bandwidth. Columbia Colocation gives you a dedicated machine in Quincy, WA — 10–20ms from Seattle, 50 Mbps of bandwidth included, your JVM settings, your mods, your rules. Rack space from $85/mo — bring your own hardware.
Shared Minecraft hosting puts your server on a node with 20 other servers. When someone's modpack spikes CPU, yours slows down. Dedicated hardware in Quincy gives you the full machine — and the latency from Seattle is functionally the same.
Your own server — every core and thread is yours. No hypervisor neighbors running their Tekkit pack at 2am while your players are trying to raid. Every CPU cycle is yours.
Vanilla, modpacks, plugins, dynmap, voice chat — 50 Mbps included, no per-GB billing. Comfortably covers the vast majority of Minecraft servers, even with heavy modpacks and voice chat.
Full root access. Install Paper, Spigot, Fabric, Forge, Purpur — whatever you want. Tune JVM flags, run custom startup scripts, deploy your own monitoring. No panel limiting what you can install.
Quincy, WA to Seattle is 10–20ms round-trip — imperceptible lag in Minecraft. Your players in the Pacific Northwest get sub-20ms connections. Grant County players get sub-5ms.
Put fast NVMe or SSD storage in your own server. Chunk loading, world saves, backup rotations — fast storage means a snappy server, especially on large worlds or modpacks with heavy world generation.
$85/mo flat for 1U (you supply the server). No per-player billing, 50 Mbps of bandwidth included, no premium tier for actually using the hardware. What you see is what you pay — every month.
| Factor | Columbia Colocation Colo (your server) · Quincy, WA | Shared Minecraft Host Apex, Bisect, Shockbyte | Cloud VPS AWS/Linode/DO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost (hosting) | $85 flat per 1U — you own the server | $40–$120 (shared, limited RAM) | $300–$600+ |
| Hardware | Dedicated — yours alone | Shared node, shared CPU | Shared hypervisor |
| Bandwidth | 50Mbps included, no per-GB | Capped or throttled | Metered or egress billed |
| Root access | Full root + your own iDRAC/IPMI | Panel only | Root, no hardware mgmt |
| JVM control | Fully custom | Panel-limited | Custom if root |
| Latency to Seattle | 10–20ms | Varies (usually US-East) | 20–35ms (Oregon) |
| Contract | None — month-to-month | Monthly | Monthly |
Founder rate, 1U. You own the server.
Tell us your player count and what you're running — we'll talk through your hardware options and get you set up.