Aternos free limits, and the point where free stops being the right answer
Aternos is genuinely free, it has been free for years, and for a large number of Minecraft groups it is the correct choice. This page is not an argument that you should stop using it. It is a plain description of what the free tier limits, so you can tell the difference between "this is annoying" and "this is actually costing us the world we are trying to play in".
The four limits that actually matter
| Limit | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| The server sleeps when empty | Aternos stops your server once nobody is online. This is the whole reason it can be free: your slot goes back into a shared pool. Nothing runs while you are away. |
| You queue to start it | The first person who wants to play has to wake the server and wait. Off-peak that is often a couple of minutes. Evenings and weekends, when everyone else wants the same shared pool, it gets materially longer. |
| RAM is small | Free allocations land around 1-2 GB, assigned dynamically. Fine for vanilla. Not fine for a serious modpack. |
| Storage caps out | Roughly 4 GB per server. This is the one people hit without warning, because a big modpack plus a world that has been explored for a few months gets there faster than you would expect. |
There are ads too, which is a fair trade and not really a functional limit, so we will leave it there.
What free is genuinely good for
Being honest about this matters, because most "Aternos alternative" pages skip straight to selling you something.
- A group that plays together, at arranged times. If four of you get on voice chat and then start the server, the queue is a minor irritation, not a problem. You were all arriving at once anyway.
- Vanilla or a light plugin set. 1-2 GB is real headroom for vanilla Minecraft. The RAM limit only becomes a wall when mods enter.
- Trying an idea out. Testing whether your friends actually want to play a modpack before anyone pays for anything is exactly what a free tier is for.
- Short-lived worlds. If the world is not meant to outlive the month, storage and uptime never become an issue.
The four situations where it stops working
1. People play at different times
This is the big one, and it is a structural mismatch rather than an inconvenience. The moment your group spans time zones or schedules, "the server is only up when someone wakes it" means the second person to log on that day gets an empty world and a queue. Anything that depends on the world continuing while you are gone, which is most of the good parts of Minecraft, simply does not happen.
2. You are running a real modpack
A 1-2 GB allocation does not run All The Mods, Better MC, or anything in that weight class. Our modpack sizing figures put ATM10 at 10-12 GB for a small group and 14-16 GB with players on, and even a lighter pack like RLCraft wants 5-7 GB. That is not a tuning problem you can flag your way out of, though Aikar's flags are still worth using wherever you end up. The 4 GB storage cap bites here too: modpack plus generated world plus backups adds up fast.
3. Anything that needs uptime to work
Redstone farms, mob farms, crop growth, villager mechanics, chunk loaders, scheduled backups, a Discord bridge that reports server events. All of it assumes the server is running. On a server that sleeps, these either do nothing or behave unpredictably, and you spend your session re-establishing state instead of playing.
4. You want people to just be able to join
If you are running anything semi-public, or even just a server your friends should be able to hop onto on a whim, "someone has to start it and everyone waits" is the end of casual play. People try once, see a queue, and do not come back.
What always-on actually costs
The honest number is smaller than most people expect, and it is worth knowing before you decide, because the decision often gets framed as free versus expensive when it is really free versus a few dollars.
A vanilla or light-plugin server for a handful of friends sits at the bottom of the market. A mid-size modpack is the middle. A 300-mod pack with a full group is the top. We break the whole range down, including how to work out which tier you actually need, on our Minecraft server cost page, and the short version is that RAM is what you are buying, so sizing it correctly is the entire decision.
The thing paid hosting removes is not really "speed". It is the three-way tax of waking the server, waiting in a queue, and losing everything that should have happened while you were offline.
How to decide, quickly
- Does everyone play at the same time? If yes, free is probably still fine. If no, that alone justifies moving.
- Is your pack over about 100 mods? If yes, you have already outgrown the RAM allocation, and you will hit the storage cap eventually too.
- Does anything need to run while you are away? Farms, growth, automation. If yes, sleep mode is deleting the point of the world.
- Are you waking the server more than once a session? That is the tell that the queue has stopped being background noise.
If you answered no to all four, stay on the free tier. It is doing its job.
Related guides
- How much does a Minecraft server cost?
- Modpack server hardware sizing (ATM, Better MC, RLCraft)
- Aikar's flags: JVM tuning that actually helps
- Fixing server lag
If you land on the "we need it always on" side of that list, Supercraft Minecraft hosting runs on AMD EPYC hardware with NVMe storage, no sleep and no start queue, automated backups, in-place plan upgrades so you can resize when a modpack grows, and a 2-day refund window. Live pricing for your region is on the plan page.