What You Should Know Before Making Your Own Minecraft Server

Minecraft is enormous; so enormous, in fact, that it's not even bound to the servers that Microsoft and Mojang host for the game. Many intrepid players out there host their own MInecraft servers, and you may be someone who has an interest in doing so yourself. However, there are a few things you should know first.

For starters, hosting a Minecraft server is not a great activity for beginners. In fact, if you don't have experience hosting or configuring servers of other types (web, email, etc.) then you should probably steer clear of putting one online for Minecraft. Ask yourself: are you comfortable installing Java? Setting the server up from the command line? Creating a batch file? If all of that sounds like gibberish to you, a personal Minecraft server might not be the right move.

If you do know your way around the backend of a PC operating system, though, you'll find a Minecraft server fairly simple to maintain, as the server software itself is fairly lightweight. You don't need a monster of a PC to run such a server. If you play Minecraft on a system and that system is not a laptop or a netbook, it's probably capable of handling a Minecraft server.

And lastly, you can set up a Minecraft server on just about any operating system out there. The world is your oyster! Want to toss a server up on Windows? You can. Want to host some Minecraft fun on your macOS machine? Totally doable. Do you prefer Linux? Minecraft's server software supports Solus, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Arch Linux, Gentoo, and... yeah, pretty much any distribution worth mentioning. If you rock Linux, you might have trouble finding a flavor of it that a Minecraft server won't run on.

How does that all sound? Do you think you're ready to set up your own Minecraft server now, or do you think it's better left in the hands of professionals? In either case, we hope we provided you with some helpful information.