In need of a paid Aternos server alternative (Exaroton excluded)
I am planning to shift from Aternos to a paid Minecraft server since the queue times are too long and I don't mind paying a small amount for a server in general.
I am looking for a cheap alternative that has similar functionalities to what Aternos provides like mod support, console, server permissions, backups etc but with additional features expected from a paid server. I plan to play with not more than 6 players at once and even lesser players on average. My friends and I won't be playing regularly and we won't be in need of high specs as long as the server remains reasonably stable when running farms or other contraptions.
I tried to use Exaroton as it was made by the Aternos team and I don't have any complaints with its features but its payment provider was just not accepting any mode of payment I offering. I dealt with this issue long enough to realize it's not worth trying anymore.
There are a ton of Minecraft hosting providers out there but I want the community's suggestions on which among them are trustworthy or value for money. I will go through all of the recommendations and choose the one that suits my needs the best.
If you are ok with learing something, then I suggest renting a VPS, its your own part of a computer in a data center. I had one from a local provider that cost 7€/month for 6 cores, 18gb ram and 256gb ssd storage, way cheaper than any mc server provider Ive seen.
The thing is you have to do a lot yourself, but there are great tutorals on how to run mc servers on linux.
You can run something like Lodestone and have a webui for your servers, but you dont have to.
Oracle cloud has a very generous free offer that i use that gives 4 arm cores and 24 gb of ram. I run about a dozen plugins including geyser and i never notice any slowdown and it never complains about missing ticks or anything. I only ever have about 4 people playing at the same time though