An 8 GB Minecraft server costs $8 a month at the cheapest game host we track and $24 at the most expensive one. That is the same 8 GB of memory at three times the price, in HostingSift's nightly price snapshots on 10 November 2026. A bare VPS with 8 GB starts at €4.40 a month, if you prepay two years and do all the setup yourself.
The sign-up price hides most of that gap. Over four years, the $8 game server costs less than Hostinger's own 8 GB VPS at $8.79, because the first price never changes and the second renews at $14.99. Below are the 65 plans that run Minecraft across six game hosts, the cheapest 8 GB VPS plans we found among 42 hosts, and what each one adds up to once the renewal price kicks in.
A note on terms. A game host here means a company that runs the Minecraft server for you and hands you a control panel. A VPS is an empty Linux machine you rent and set up yourself. The renewal price is what you pay after the first prepaid term ends.
What a Minecraft server costs at 4, 8 and 16 GB
On 10 November 2026, a 4 GB Minecraft server cost between $4.00 and $12.00 a month at the five game hosts we track with plans at that size, an 8 GB server between $8.00 and $24.00, and a 16 GB server between $13.99 and $48.00. All figures come from HostingSift's nightly snapshots of each host's order page.
| Host and plan line | 4 GB | 8 GB | 16 GB | Billing behind that price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PebbleHost Budget | $4.00 | $8.00 | $16.00 | Monthly |
| Hostinger Game Panel | $6.99 | $9.49 | $13.99 | 24 months prepaid |
| Private Hosting MC | €6.99 | €13.99 | €24.99 | Monthly, excl. VAT |
| Godlike.Host Budget | €10.17 | €20.33 | €40.58 | Yearly, incl. VAT |
| ExtraVM | $12.00 | $24.00 | $48.00 | Monthly |
Euro prices convert at roughly $1.15 per euro, so Private Hosting's 8 GB plan is about $16.09 and Godlike's about $23.38. The two euro hosts are not taxed the same way: Godlike's price already includes VAT, Private Hosting adds it at checkout for EU buyers. Godlike also sells its 8 GB Java plan only in the modded line (it calls the size "Unstoppable"), and its yearly price is the low one. Paid monthly, that 8 GB plan is €25.99.
Most of these hosts charge a fixed amount per gigabyte, at every size. PebbleHost Budget is $1.00 per GB, so its 36 GB plan costs exactly $36. ExtraVM is $3.00 per GB in all four of its regions. Godlike works out to €2.54 per GB on the yearly term from 2 GB up to 20 GB, so a bigger plan never buys you a cheaper gigabyte.
Hostinger breaks that pattern because its Game Panel plans are VPS machines with a panel installed. Its price per GB falls from $1.75 at 4 GB to $0.87 at 16 GB.
Two outliers sit outside the table. Evolution Host sells a 1 GB Minecraft server for €2.99 and then jumps to its Game VPS line, where 8 GB with 6 vCPU costs €60.00 a month. And Godlike has a free 2 GB plan, which you have to extend by hand every 3 hours.
Hostinger sells the same 8 GB machine twice
Hostinger's Game Panel 2 Minecraft plan and its KVM 2 VPS have identical specs: 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB NVMe and 8 TB of bandwidth. On 10 November 2026 the game plan cost $9.49 a month on a 24-month prepay and the VPS $8.79, and both renew at $14.99 a month, according to Hostinger's own pricing pages.
| Specs | Game Panel plan | KVM VPS plan | Renewal price (both) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU, 4 GB, 50 GB NVMe | $6.99 | $6.49 | $11.99 |
| 2 vCPU, 8 GB, 100 GB NVMe | $9.49 | $8.79 | $14.99 |
| 4 vCPU, 16 GB, 200 GB NVMe | $13.99 | $12.99 | $28.99 |
| 8 vCPU, 32 GB, 400 GB NVMe | $27.99 | $25.99 | $49.99 |
So the game panel costs $0.50 to $2.00 a month for the first two years and nothing after that. At 8 GB the upfront bill is $227.76 for the game plan against $210.96 for the VPS. I'd pay the $16.80 difference without thinking: it buys you a working Minecraft panel on day one instead of an evening spent installing one.
The renewal price hits both plans equally: month 25 costs $14.99 whichever one you picked. If you don't want to commit at all, KVM 2 costs $13.99 for the first month and $24.49 after, which is also the crossed-out "regular" price on both pages.
Renting a bare 8 GB VPS instead
A bare 8 GB VPS costs less than any 8 GB game plan if you commit to a long term. On 10 November 2026, Contabo's Cloud VPS 4 cost €4.40 a month excluding VAT on a 24-month term, and NameHero's Plus VPS cost $5.25 a month on a 3-year prepay. Both leave Java, the server software and any control panel to you.
| Host and plan | CPU and disk | Price per month | Term for that price | Renewal price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contabo Cloud VPS 4 | 4 vCPU, 100 GB SSD | €4.40 | 24 months (€105.60 upfront) | None listed beyond the term price |
| NameHero Plus VPS | 2 vCPU, 100 GB NVMe | $5.25 | 36 months ($189.00 upfront) | $15.92 |
| Hostinger KVM 2 | 2 vCPU, 100 GB NVMe | $8.79 | 24 months ($210.96 upfront) | $14.99 |
| InterServer 4 Slices | 2 cores, 160 GB SSD | $12.00 | Monthly | $12.00 |
| Hetzner CPX32 | 4 vCPU, 160 GB NVMe | €35.99 | Monthly, excl. VAT | No term to renew |
Contabo is the cheapest 8 GB machine here by a wide margin, and its order page shows the trade-offs plainly: a 200 Mbit/s port, SSD rather than NVMe storage, and a €2.00 setup fee if you pick the 1-month term at €5.50. NameHero's $5.25 is a three-year commitment that renews at three times the price. InterServer has no term discount to lose: $12.00 is the price every month.
The big developer clouds are a different price class for this job. Hetzner's CPX32 at €35.99 is more than four times what PebbleHost charges for an 8 GB Minecraft server.
One cheaper row is missing on purpose. Time4VPS lists 8 GB for €3.51 a month on its Container line, but those are OpenVZ containers that share the host's kernel, and for a game server I'd rather have a KVM machine. The full ranking of 8 GB plans, with every host, is in our VPS price per GB of RAM index.
Two and four years of the same 8 GB server
Added up over 48 months at 10 November 2026 prices, the cheapest 8 GB option we track is a Contabo VPS at €211.20 excluding VAT, and the cheapest game server is PebbleHost Budget 8 GB at $384.00. Hostinger's Game Panel 2 comes to $587.52, because its $9.49 sign-up price renews at $14.99.
| 8 GB option | First 24 months | 48 months | How the total is built |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contabo Cloud VPS 4 | €105.60 | €211.20 | Two 24-month terms, excl. VAT |
| NameHero Plus VPS | $189.00 (covers 36 months) | $380.04 | 3-year prepay, then 12 months at $15.92 |
| PebbleHost Budget 8GB | $192.00 | $384.00 | $8.00 every month |
| Hostinger KVM 2 | $210.96 | $570.72 | 24-month prepay, renewed at $14.99 |
| Hostinger Game Panel 2 | $227.76 | $587.52 | 24-month prepay, renewed at $14.99 |
| InterServer 4 Slices | $288.00 | $576.00 | $12.00 every month |
| Private Hosting MC-8-GB | €335.76 | €671.52 | €13.99 every month, excl. VAT |
| Godlike.Host Unstoppable Budget | €487.98 | €975.96 | Yearly terms at €243.99, incl. VAT |
| ExtraVM Minecraft 8GB | $576.00 | $1,152.00 | $24.00 every month |
PebbleHost's managed server and NameHero's bare VPS end within $4 of each other after four years, but only one of them asked for $189 upfront and three years of commitment. Hostinger's game plan looks barely dearer than the $8 server on the sign-up page and finishes about $200 behind both.
These totals assume nobody changes their price, and that is not guaranteed. Private Hosting raised its Minecraft plans by 40 to 55% in October (details below). If you want to run your own numbers with a different term or renewal price, the true cost calculator does the arithmetic.
How many players fit in a gigabyte, by the hosts' own numbers
ExtraVM's order page assumes five players per gigabyte, from 5 players on 1 GB to 160 on 32 GB. Godlike.Host promises 5 to 10 slots on 2 GB and 20 or more on 4 GB, while PebbleHost and Private Hosting sell unlimited slots. Those claims, read from the hosts' pages on 10 November 2026, are sales copy, and none of them says how it was measured.
Memory goes mostly to loaded chunks and mods, and the view distance you set decides how many chunks stay loaded. Ten players spread across a big world use far more than ten players standing in one town.
What I plan for: 4 GB covers vanilla or Paper (a faster drop-in replacement for Mojang's server software) with up to about ten players. A light modpack, or 20-plus players on Paper, wants 6 to 8 GB. The big modpacks with a few hundred mods want 10 to 12 GB, and Godlike's own line-up agrees in its way: it doesn't sell modded Java plans below 6 GB at all.
What a game host does that a VPS leaves to you
A game host sells a running Minecraft server: a control panel, one-click version and modpack installs, and DDoS filtering in front of it. A VPS sells an empty Linux machine. In November 2026, Hostinger charges $0.70 a month for that difference on its 8 GB plan, while ExtraVM's $24 for 8 GB is more than four times Contabo's €4.40.
On a VPS, that work is yours. Current Minecraft versions need a recent Java runtime (21 or newer), so you install it. You open the right port in the firewall and keep SSH locked down. You either run the server as a system service or install a panel such as Pterodactyl, an open-source game panel (Private Hosting runs it on its own plans). Backups have to go somewhere other than the server itself, and OS security updates are on you too.
CPU matters more than the spec sheets let on. Minecraft's main game loop runs on one thread, so the speed of a single core decides how many players and farms the server can handle before it lags. PebbleHost names its processors: an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X on Budget and a Ryzen 9 9900X on Premium, which costs $2.25 per GB. VPS listings almost never name the model, and a shared vCPU means other customers' workloads run on the same core.
The VPS starts winning once you want more than one thing on the machine. A lobby server plus a survival server behind a proxy, a Discord bot, a map renderer and a small website all fit on one 16 GB VPS. A game host bills each of those separately or doesn't offer them at all.
Which Minecraft prices moved in 2026
Private Hosting raised all four of its Minecraft plans on 20 October 2026. The 8 GB plan went from €9.00 to €13.99 a month (+55%) and the 4 GB plan from €5.00 to €6.99 (+40%), and the new prices held every night through 10 November in HostingSift's snapshots. PebbleHost, ExtraVM and Hostinger's Game Panel have not moved since we started tracking them in March.
The 16 GB and 32 GB plans at Private Hosting rose 47% each, from €17.00 to €24.99 and from €34.00 to €49.99. The old prices had held since 13 August. Its VPS and Hytale plans did not change that night, which rules out a VAT or currency switch: this was a Minecraft repricing. The store page showed €13.99 for the 8 GB plan when I checked it on 10 November. The full series is on the Private Hosting price history page.
Hostinger's KVM 2 VPS went from $6.99 to $8.99 on 3 March 2026, after its renewal price moved from $12.99 to $14.99 on 27 February. That was part of a line-wide increase we covered in VPS price increases in 2026. It spent 18 August to 19 October at $8.99 and has been $8.79 since 20 October. Its Game Panel 2 twin has not changed from $9.49 since we began tracking it on 14 March. Both series are on the Hostinger price history page.
PebbleHost has charged $1.00 per GB on Budget and $2.25 on Premium without a change since 17 March 2026. ExtraVM has been $3.00 per GB since 29 March. We only started tracking Godlike.Host on 14 October, so it has no history worth reading yet.
What I would actually rent
For a vanilla or Paper server with up to ten players, I'd rent 4 GB from a flat per-GB game host: $4.00 a month at PebbleHost Budget on 10 November 2026, billed monthly, with no sign-up discount that runs out. For a modpack, 8 GB at the same host is $8.00. I'd move to a VPS only above 16 GB, or to run several servers on one machine.
If the Budget tier's older Ryzen 7 5700X lags with your farms, Premium at $18.00 for 8 GB is still cheaper than ExtraVM's $24.00 and gets you the faster 9900X.
If you're set on Hostinger, take the Game Panel plan over the bare KVM. The $0.70 a month is worth it. But plan to move before month 25, because at $14.99 the 8 GB plan costs almost twice what the flat $8 server does.
If you're comfortable on a Linux command line and want the lowest total, Contabo's Cloud VPS 4 at €4.40 a month is the cheapest 8 GB machine we track, as long as you accept a 24-month term and a 200 Mbit/s port. NameHero is cheaper upfront than Hostinger, but a three-year prepay that renews at $15.92 only pays off if you're sure the server will still be running in 2029.
For every Minecraft plan we track, with filters for RAM and price, see the Minecraft server hosting list.
Originally published at hostingsift.com.
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