Why we bill you only while you're playing

A friend-group server has a shape. Everyone piles on for a weekend, plays hard for two evenings, then nobody logs in until next Saturday. The world sits there, fully powered, doing nothing — and on a traditional host you pay for every one of those empty hours.

That is the thing we set out to fix, and it is the one decision that shapes everything else about how ChunkyHost works.

What hibernation actually does

When the last player disconnects, we wait. If nobody comes back within the idle window, the server saves its world and stops. The container is gone; the world, configs, plugins and mods are not. When someone next tries to connect, the address they have always used wakes the server back up and drops them in.

Two things matter about that sequence:

• Your world is untouched. Hibernation is a stop, not a reset. Whatever you built is exactly where you left it.
• The address never changes. Your friends do not need a new IP, a new port, or a Discord message explaining what happened. They just join.

The trade is real and worth stating plainly: the first person through the door waits while the server comes back, which an always-on box would not make them do. Everyone after them connects normally.

Why this is a billing decision, not a feature

Plenty of hosts will happily sell you a bigger plan. Very few will sell you fewer hours. Hibernation is the second thing — and it only works as a promise if the billing follows it, which is why the meter stops when the server does rather than “crediting” you something later.

If your server genuinely runs 24/7 — a public SMP, a community with players in several timezones, anything with uptime obligations to strangers — hibernation saves you nothing, because nothing is ever idle. That is a perfectly good reason to buy a plain always-on plan, from us or from anyone.

We did not invent this

We would rather say so here than have you find out from a comparison table.

exaroton sells on-demand Minecraft hosting billed per gigabyte-hour, and Aternos — the same team — built the free tier that taught a whole generation of players the idea. Hibernation is not our invention and we do not claim it as one. What we argue is narrower: that on-demand billing should come with dedicated, high-clock hardware and a real control panel rather than a queue — and that for a weekend friend group, the arithmetic usually lands in your favour.

Usually is not always. For a small world played in short, scattered bursts, exaroton’s per-gigabyte-hour rate can land below our entry plan — their pricing page publishes the rate, so check it against your own play pattern rather than taking our word for it.

What to check before you switch

1. Count your real playing hours in a week. Not the hours the server is up — the hours someone is actually online. If that number is close to 168, hibernation is not for you.
2. Decide whether a cold-start wait is acceptable. For a friend group joining a voice call together, it is invisible. For a public server listed on a directory, it is not.
3. Look at the plan, not the RAM number. How much memory you need is a much smaller question than most hosts make it — we wrote a whole guide arguing you probably need less than you have been sold.

Current plans and what each one includes are on the pricing page, along with the cancellation and refund terms.