Building a high-performance multiplayer server for friends (or a larger community) means going beyond ready-made shared hosting offers. Limits on plugins, Java versions, and player slots usually lead everyone to the same path: hosting your server on a VPS.
Why a "Game VPS" Specifically?
Unlike websites, game servers such as Minecraft, Rust, or FiveM are difficult to run efficiently on the server side for two reasons:
- They are mostly single-threaded (they depend more on CPU single-core frequency in GHz than on core count).
- Game UDP traffic is the number one target for DDoS attacks launched by players or competitors.
That is why Infrawire Game VPS includes high-frequency AMD Ryzen CPUs (up to 5+ GHz) and a game-focused Anti-DDoS firewall (Arbor / L7 UDP filtering) to absorb hundreds of gigabits of attacks without dropping your sessions.
1. Choose the Right Server Engine: Vanilla Is Not Your Friend
The .jar software from Mojang (official Vanilla) uses too much RAM and CPU, even on good servers. It computes physics, mob AI, and blocks mostly on a single CPU core.
Solution: Use a high-performance fork (Paper / Purpur / Folia)
- PaperMC (Paper): Today's industry standard. Fixes memory leaks, optimizes AI behavior, and handles far more players than Spigot.
- Purpur: Built on top of PaperMC, with advanced tick-level optimization controls.
- Folia: Designed to split map regions across multiple CPU cores on your Ryzen VPS. Very efficient when players are spread out.
2. Allocate Java Memory Properly (Aikar's Flags)
Java's garbage collector often causes major lag spikes in-game ("TPS drops"). It aggressively cleans memory and can freeze gameplay briefly at regular intervals.
Optimizing startup arguments (Aikar's Flags) is critical. Instead of simply running java -Xmx4G -Xms4G -jar server.jar, use JVM flags tuned for G1GC.
3. Pre-Generate the Map
The most CPU-intensive action on your VPS is chunk generation. When a player flies with an Elytra over unexplored terrain, your CPU struggles to generate forests and mountains in real time.
- Install the Chunky plugin.
- Set world border:
/chunky border 10000. - Start pre-generation when no one is online:
/chunky start. - Let it run for a few hours. Terrain will be saved on Infrawire's fast NVMe SSD storage, removing map-exploration lag.
4. Protect Your VPS Against Game UDP DDoS
A competitor can pay a few dollars for a booter/stresser and flood your Minecraft server with UDP amplification traffic. Your ISP may automatically null-route your server to protect its network.
At Infrawire, network protection is not a premium extra, it is native to AS210699:
- Our Anti-DDoS VPS includes L4 and L7 mitigation rules.
- Our scrubbing intelligence detects amplification instantly.
- Legit traffic passes, attack traffic is filtered away, and your ping stays low.
Start your next esports, survival, SMP, HCF, or faction adventure on our AMD Ryzen Minecraft VPS from €3.99/month.