How to Find the Best Minecraft Servers

Minecraft is amazing. No matter whether you love building massive monuments in creative mode or battling Endermen in adventure mode, you’re bound to have a fantastic gaming experience and hours of fun.

Yet if you want to play with other people, you need to find some friendly and reliable Minecraft servers that you can call home. Yet what are the qualities of an amazing gaming community?

In this guide, we’re going to take a look at how you can find the best Minecraft servers around. No matter whether you’re looking for a server for yourself, your kids, or anyone else, we’ve got you covered.

Ready to learn more? Let’s get started!

1. Pick a Vanilla Server to Start With

If you’re new to Minecraft, you should pick a vanilla server. By vanilla, we mean that the game is unaltered: all you’ll find here is the content that’s an official Minecraft. This also guarantees that the server’s content should be more family-friendly.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t experiment with Minecraft modifications (or mods, for short). Some of them are absolute game changers! Yet they can make the game far more complex, with one particular mod, Tekkit, even adding things like nuclear reactors.

We’d recommend cutting your teeth on a vanilla server before you move onto modding the game.

2. Pick Minecraft Servers That Don’t Tolerate Griefers

In video games, griefing is the act of causing another player distress by pranking them, destroying their items, or deliberately killing them. Minecraft, sadly, has a massive capacity for griefing. You could build an amazing structure, only to have someone come along and destroy it with TNT!

Great Minecraft servers will enforce a non-griefing policy. Any player who deliberately attacks other players, destroys their creations, or does anything else antisocial will get kicked off the server.

This is an important consideration for kids and adults alike, considering that your creations stay on the server even when you’ve logged off. If you want to know that they’re safe, you need to find a server that doesn’t tolerate any griefing.

3. Consider Player Counts

Some servers have thousands of people playing at any time, while others have as few as two or three. The number of players on a Minecraft server can make a massive difference to your gaming experience.

If you want to have a very chill game, you should stick to servers that only have a few players. If, however, you want to be part of huge cooperative projects or play lots of different minigames, you should find servers that have more players.

You should also be mindful of the maximum number of players. Every server has a maximum number of players that can be online at any time, and if it’s full, you’ll have to wait for someone to leave before you can join in.

4. Check the Uptime and Ping

If a Minecraft server goes down, you can’t just continue working on your projects. You’ll have to wait for it to come back online before you can get back to gaming.

Before you decide on a server, you should check on its uptime. Many different factors will affect this, including:

• Hackers targeting the server
• Insufficient resources
• Lost network connections

You should also check out a server’s ping before you join it. The ping is a measurement in milliseconds of how long it takes for data from your computer to reach the server and be returned. If the ping is too high (more than 100 ms or so), you’ll notice some lag, which may make the gameplay less enjoyable for you.

Lots of different factors can affect ping, but some notable ones include:

• The server’s geographic location
• Your internet speed
• The server’s connection speed

5. Is the Server Family-Friendly?

If you’ve got a young gamer who wants to play Minecraft, you’ll need to make sure that the server is family-friendly. It’s worth taking a look at the server rules as your starting point. You can see whether they ban swearing in the chat or allow it.

You can also see whether the server allows the use of a custom Minecraft skin for player characters. If it does, does it enforce a safe for work skin policy?

You should also make sure that the server has active moderators. These players will make sure that everything stays family-friendly and safe for work.

6. Try Out the Server

There’s no cost to joining Minecraft servers. If you want to see whether its promised uptime is a reality, whether it’s the kind of environment you want to play in, or what other players are up to, the best way to find out is by joining the server yourself and taking a look.

Don’t feel the need to start building or crafting materials. You can simply walk around and look at what other people are doing and decide whether it’s for you or not.

7. Consider Making Your Own Server

If you can’t find a server that you like and you want to play with family and friends, then why not make your own private Minecraft server? If you make your own server, you’ll be able to set the rules and curate a fantastic gaming experience for you and other players.

Making your own server also lets you make a critical decision about the server’s specifications. If you want to have a fast and streamlined gaming experience, you can pick a high-powered server, while if you want a cost-effective server, you can find one of those too.

Ready to Play?

There are a ton of different Minecraft servers, but if you want to have a personalized experience, you need to make your own. We can help you: we offer a huge range of different servers that can handle as many players as you like, on both Java and Bedrock.

For more information, take a look at our Minecraft servers page. If you’ve got any questions about our servers, check out our knowledgebase or contact us.