exaroton alternative: the honest comparison

exaroton and TickServ share one idea — you only pay while your server is running — and differ on nearly everything else. Here are the figures, taken from their official pages on 24 August 2026, including the cases where exaroton is the better choice for you.

Two ways of counting

At exaroton you buy credits: 100 credits = €1.00, so one cent per credit. A server burns 1 credit per gigabyte of RAM per hour, billed to the nearest hundredth of a credit — half an hour costs half an hour. RAM runs from 2 to 16 GB and is set per server. You get 5 free credits when you sign up, and that is the only free credit on offer.

With us, the price follows the RAM tier and the performance level — never the game — and the hour is billed as soon as it starts: the first minute pays for the hour, the other fifty-nine are already covered.

Price, tier by tier

On our Eco tier the gap is 2× at 4 GB and more than 3× at 16 GB. On our Dedicated CPU tier — cores nobody else shares — exaroton is cheaper again at 8 GB, and we move back ahead at 16.

Where the started hour works against us

This is the flip side of our billing, and it deserves to be said plainly: for a short session, exaroton costs less.

A started hour at €0.02 on 4 GB buys thirty minutes at exaroton. On 8 GB, our €0.03 hour is worth about twenty minutes on their side. Below half an hour of play, they win. Above it — an evening, a weekend, a normal session with friends — the hourly gap takes over by a wide margin.

What happens when the server is off

This is the structural difference between the two services.

exaroton stops the machine and keeps your disk: up to 10 GB per server, charged up to 10 credits (≈ €0.10) per 30 days. That amount is offset against what you spent running the server, so it drops to zero as soon as you play a little. Their backups go to your own Google Drive and cost nothing.

We destroy the machine and keep your world on our side, with no fee and no advertised size quota, under a single rule: a world left with no activity for 180 days is purged, and only after two email reminders. A stopped server costs zero here, with no asterisk.

Auto-start on join: their advantage

exaroton starts the server on its own when a player tries to connect (AutoStart) and stops it when it empties out (AutoStop). Both are free.

We have no equivalent to the first one, and that is not an oversight. Because the machine is destroyed, waking it means provisioning it again and restoring the world: the player would be left waiting at a connection screen with no idea why. We chose automatic shutdown when nobody is playing, weekly schedules, and a Discord command to wake the server before you launch the game. If start-on-join is what matters to you, exaroton does it better.

Games

exaroton is Minecraft — Java and Bedrock, with over 500 one-click modpacks. It is a specialist's choice, and the polish shows.

Here, one wallet funds seven games, from sandbox to survival. That helps if your group switches games over the months; it helps not at all if you only ever play Minecraft.

So, which one?

Pick exaroton if you play Minecraft and nothing else, if your sessions are short and frequent, or if start-on-join is the feature you would miss most.

Pick TickServ if your sessions run past half an hour, if you want the lowest rate at equal RAM, if you need more than 16 GB, or if you change games without wanting to change hosts.

If you are torn, the deciding factor is not the headline price but how you play: count your sessions over a week, multiply by their average length, and apply both rates. The hourly vs monthly comparison runs the same maths against a classic subscription.

exaroton figures taken on 24 August 2026 from exaroton.com and support.exaroton.com (pricing, storage, AutoStart/AutoStop, supported games). Our rates come from our own catalogue and are the ones shown on the site. A competitor's prices can change without notice: check them before you decide.