Choosing a Minecraft host is a real minefield at times, you never know whether the company you have chosen is just going to disappear or be plagued with credibility destroying downtime. As you may already know, we have run a Minecraft community for over a year (Split An Atom Gaming), with a growing server populace and increasingly ambitious ideas, we needed to find a new Minecraft server provider. MultiMinecraft stood out from the rest of the crowd with their slick presentation and professional attitudes, they are the self-proclaimed world’s fastest Minecraft servers, but how do their servers stand up in reality?
We chose an 8GB Premium Minecraft server from MultiMinecraft for the purposes of this review, this is also known as their Premium Obsidian plan and costs $159.92 USD per month, although they do offer a price reduction if you pay for larger periods of time in advance.
The MultiMinecraft Server Specifications
The network is powered by Cisco Core Routers with Juniper EX Layer 3 switching. Internap FCP device creates an optimized route for the network mix, allowing connections from around the world to maintain a low-latency connection to the server. With the network being uplinked via 10GE Fiber network ports, this minimizes latency during a DDoS attack as well as preventing saturation of ports. The network infrastructure at the MultiMinecraft Los Angeles location also consists of a premium BGP mix of nLayer, Cogent, Zayo, Quadranet, Tinet/Intelliquent and peering via the ANY2 Fabric.
The MultiMinecraft premium server is built from some of the best commercially available hardware, including:
- SuperMicro Systems with Dual Intel™ E5-2640, E5-2660, or E5-2670 processors
- 2x Samsung Series 830 SSDs in raid configuration with RAID-1/RAID-10 Seagate Enterprise SAS HDDs for backup,
- 64GB or 128GB of DDR3 ECC Registered 1600MHz RAM,
- redundant A+B power circuits with N+1 PSUs,
- LSIs second generation 9266 RAID controllers with 1GB of DDR3 Cache
These servers are powered by redundant A+B power circuits with redundant PSUs to guarantee the best in server uptime in the event of a power cut or PSU failure.
Migration From A Previous Minecraft Server Host
To migrate our server, I simply opened the old Minecraft server and the new one via FTP in the two windows in Transmit on my MacBook Pro and simply dragged and dropped the plugins folder from one server to another, this took a little while as I had a few thousand little files, admittedly it would have been much smarter to just zip it into one archive and then move that, but this worked too.
MultiMinecraft offers a courtesy MySQL server database to use which makes using your SQL based Minecraft plugins very speedy. Having your Minecraft server and MySQL server on the same machine or on the network makes a huge amount of difference to performance as we demonstrated by at first using our own MySQL server on the opposite coast which was quite sluggish by comparison. Migrating our database was simple enough; I downloaded Sequel Pro for free for my MacBook Pro and exported the database into an SQL file locally before importing it into MultiMinecraft’s MySQL server. Once this was done, I simply edited a handful of YAML config files to reflect our new database.
MultiMinecraft Overall Server Performance
Since moving over to MultiMinecraft, we’ve had 100% uptime aside from the scheduled maintenance. I frequently check the server whenever I’m online through ‘/gc’ and I’m always glad to see that we’re running at a full 20 ticks per second even with dozens of players duking it out whilst another few dozen players are busy on their latest megabuild, it is a real feel-good to be able to proudly tell your players that your server is running at a full 20TPS and to tell that 1% of players that the ‘lag’ is most definitely at their end and to stop spamming the chat by mentioning the shortcomings of their own computer or internet connection.
Our server gets a lot of compliments from our players regarding our newly improved speed, server stability, ping and database latency. Our players really enjoy playing on our server not just for the great content and community, but for the overall server itself; MultiMinecraft weren’t kidding when they said this was ‘premium’ hosting. Accessing from the UK, I average around 200ms of ping which is pretty great considering the server is absolutely thousands of miles away in the USA.
Still not convinced by the performance of our server? Check it out on our server IP, minecraft.splitanatom.com, or find out a bit more on our community gaming website.
Server Administration
We run a CraftBukkit server with almost sixty plugins, but MultiMinecraft will also support vanilla, Tekkit, and FeedTheBeast. MultiMinecraft also gives you a dedicated IP which is great for assigning a domain to. Each server instance of McMyAdmin Enterprise is controlled through TCADMIN which gives you access to the file management system within the browser, although we personally prefer FTP for speed and ease of use.
McMyAdmin Enterprise is a very futuristic browser based server management tool with no page reloads, it is a very nicely executed web app which feels very similar to Facebook or Twitter in terms of speed and ease of use. Immediately after logging into the server control panel I was impressed, being greeted to the current status of my server; attractively presenting CPU and RAM usage in bar graph format, as well as having the percentage displayed.
Creating groups with Bukkit Permissions is ridiculously easy within the administrator’s panel. I mean, you type the name of the group, add users to it as you please and set the groups permissions as you feel need, It’s that easy.
I really like how MultiMinecraft lets me edit the configuration of the server through the web interface. No configuration files to deal with, drop menus and text fields for the settings. Managing plugins is just as easy and you simply search the name of a plugin you want to install and then click install, it really is that simple. MultiMinecraft’s McMyAdmin control panel also includes a scheduler. So you can schedule certain events during times when people aren’t online, such as routine restarts, world saves and more.
I also particularly like being able to see resource usage graphically in real-time, this made BeastNode feel a little bit archaic by comparison by keeping you in the dark as to how your server was actually doing in terms of resource usage with only ‘/gc’ to go by.
I spent weeks looking for a backup plugin on Bukkit that I liked, I didn’t find any that worked how I wanted them to. McMyAdmin Enterprise gives me the best solution I could have ever asked for; Backup management integrated directly into the web interface.
For all these advantages, there were several tradeoffs: RemoteToolKit is not supported, this means all admins need to download a new iOS app to manage our servers, but overall I wouldn’t really call this a tradeoff; it is more of a crossgrade and natural evolution of the software. Both TCADMIN and McMyAdmin Enterprise also offer you web console access which makes operating the server very easy without any additional software such as an SSH client, so administrating it through an iOS application isn’t wholly necessary, but is a nice touch to have.
Value For Money
The support team is fast, informed and very friendly and polite, they are serious industry players who treat you with respect. If you have any issues installing a plugin or just don’t know how, the team will encourage you to ask them for help and will gladly do it for you, not that we needed that, but it seems that for other users they have been very accommodating. MultiMinecraft offers a $12.50 per month plugin management service if this is something you require on a regular basis.
Whilst MultiMinecraft may seem a little more costly versus some of the other Minecraft hosting providers out there, you really do get what you pay for. If you pay very little then don’t expect much, in fact expect to get glitchy nonsense that is forever crashing with poor support who never want to speak to you, but pay a sensible amount like with MultiMinecraft and you get a team who are extremely interested in what you are doing and are very eager to help your community be everything that it can be along with some of the best hardware currently available for any web application let alone Minecraft.
$159.92 per month is very good value when you consider the quality of hardware MutliMinecraft gives you access to as well as their expertise, but MultiMinecraft can offer their Premium Obsidian plan to you for $155.12 USD per month for three months, $150.33 USD for six months or $140.73 USD for twelve months. They are currently also offering a whopping 15% recurring discount as well on their Premium packages!
If you are serious about running a Minecraft server then look no further than MultiMinecraft, this is in my opinion, the best you can find for your Minecraft community. We can’t recommend MultiMinecraft enough, and if you are a server owner looking for a healthy upgrade for your community then you should definitely consider migrating your community. You don’t have anything to lose with a seven day money back guarantee either! You can view the various packages MultiMinecraft offers here.
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