Setup Minecraft Server Hosting on DigitalOcean vs ServerFlex

Sounds great, right? Well not really - by the end of this article we hope to have shown you the issues one will face hosting with DigitalOcean, and the advantages of hosting with ServerFlex instead.

👍 DigitalOcean and ServerFlex, both offer Hourly Billing for servers.

One of the main reasons one might choose to use DigitalOcean is because of their flexible per-hour billing cycle. This is great if you're looking to run a server for a few hours. But DigitalOcean isn't the only company to offer this feature! ServerFlex supports hourly-billing for all games on the platform, including Minecraft servers.

Read more about how hourly game server hosting works.

👍 Minecraft server choices are limited on DigitalOcean - ServerFlex supports over 1,000 different modpacks and versions.

One of the biggest limitations of using DigitalOcean to host a Minecraft server, is the 1-Click install Minecaft server version. The 1-Click install only supports the plain Vanilla versions of Minecraft running the latest version. ServerFlex, on the otherhand, supports a huge range of Minecraft modpacks and versions out of the box.

Let's say you are trying to plain PaperMC on a large server. With DigitalOcean you need to download, install and manage updates yourself. But why! ServerFlex supports Vanilla, PaperMC, Forge, CraftBukkit, RLCraft, Tekkit, Spigot, Pixelmon and many more, with a 1-Click install.

See the full range of supported Minecraft Servers.

👍 Custom panel designed for Minecraft with ServerFlex.

This is an obvious one - but DigitalOcean is a general compute provider. Their panel is not designed to show you the useful information, and allow you to customise your server with a simple user interface.

ServerFlex, on the other hand has tightly integrated Minecrafrt into the control panel. We offer simple easy to manage "Settings" where you can customise your server without ever dealing with any configuration files.

👎 Backups on DigitalOcean are limited.

This is a big one for any serious server admin. The ability to easily restore from backups is not negotiable, and the DigitalOcean implementation of backups (snapshots) is not up to the job.

With ServerFlex, we automatically generate backups of your server two times a day - this can be customised to be at whichever times you like. Additionally we allow users to create custom backs whereby you can trigger a backup manually to ensure an up-to-date version of your world files are always backed up.

Our simple user interface takes all the hassle out of managing backups:

👍 Subdomains are automatically managed on ServerFlex.

Server admins don't want to hand out a random IP address to their users. They want a memorable domain or subdomain (hostname). DigitalOcean does not deal with subdomains for you. You will simply get a dedicated IP address and you must then deal with all the DNS records manually.

With ServerFlex we deal with the subdomains for your server for you - including the SRV records so you don't need to give out port details.

👎 ServerFlex does not include dedicated IP addresses as standard, DigitalOcean does.

This is one feature that DigitalOcean does provide for free, and ServerFlex charges for. Dedicated IP addresses are not included in the base price and must be added with an add-on at checkout. This will usually only cost another $2-3 per month.

👍 24 Hour Refund Window on ServerFlex. None with DigitalOcean.

That's right, you have no recourse with DigitalOcean - there is no refund window on your Minecraft server. However with ServerFlex we offer a no-questions-asked 24 hour refund window for all purchases made on the platform.

Additionally we offer a 2 hour free trial for all products - try and buy with no risk!

👍 ServerFlex Data Centre Hardware is specifically designed for game servers.

AMD Ryzen 7's and 9's, with NVMe SSDs and DDR4 RAM - our dedicated servers located around the world are designed for gaming.  For specifics on which hardware we use, check out or article: What hardware does ServerFlex use?

That wraps it up for our DigitalOcean vs ServerFlex comparison! What did you think? Let us know by joining our community Discord: https://discord.gg/V6sfc82nge