How much RAM for your game server?

The short answer fits in a table. The useful answer needs one insight: a lot of lag has nothing to do with RAM, and in those cases adding more will change nothing. Sometimes it makes things worse.

The benchmarks, game by game

These are the tiers we recommend in the creation form, and they are deliberately cautious: a comfortable server beats one that dies on the twentieth hour of play.

Why more RAM can make things worse

Here is the part nobody mentions, because it runs against the interest of every hosting vendor: giving a Minecraft server too much RAM degrades performance.

The reason lies in the Java virtual machine. The garbage collector has to sweep the heap on every cycle. The bigger the heap, the longer the sweep, and pauses get longer rather than shorter. In practice, a small vanilla server handed 16 GB starts stuttering at regular intervals, typically every thirty to sixty seconds. It has no more players and no more chunks, it just has too much memory to scan.

So the rule is: what your server needs, plus 20 to 30% of headroom, and no more. You also have to leave room for the operating system and the server's off-heap memory, which is already factored into the tiers above.

Put another way, going from 8 to 16 GB "just in case" is not a neutral precaution. If you have no specific reason to move up, don't.

RAM or CPU? Getting the diagnosis right

Before paying more, work out what is actually slow. The symptoms do not look alike.

The most common and most misdiagnosed case is the second. On Factorio, simulation speed (UPS) depends on single-core performance: a giant factory will drop UPS no matter how much RAM is available. On Valheim, a growing map also weighs more on the processor than on memory. In both cases adding gigabytes achieves nothing, and the dedicated CPU tier is what you want.

What actually consumes RAM

• Loaded chunks. Every exploring player loads terrain, and the further apart your players are, the more active areas sit in memory.
• Mods. This is the most brutal factor: a hundred-mod pack can triple or quadruple the needs of an equivalent vanilla server.
• Already-explored terrain, on Factorio. The game keeps everything discovered in memory and never unloads it. A fresh map fits in a few hundred megabytes, but usage only climbs as the game goes on. That is the reason for the headroom recommended on this game.
• Entities. Lots of mobs, automated farms or Pal bases weigh more than the world's size on disk suggests.

How to know whether you really need to move up

The simplest approach is to watch during a real session, not an empty one. A server running fine for two hours with everyone connected does not need more memory, even if the figure on display looks high: a Java virtual machine happily occupies the space it is given without needing it.

The signals that justify one more tier are concrete: repeated crashes, stutters that appear after several hours and vanish after a restart, or adding a modpack that itself states a higher requirement.

And since the rate here depends on RAM rather than on the game, changing tier does not require renegotiating anything: you recreate a server at the size you want and import your world. The cost guide gives the price of each tier.

Eco or dedicated CPU?

• Eco (shared vCPU): the best price/performance ratio, and the right choice for the vast majority of games.
• Dedicated CPU (dedicated vCPU): guaranteed stable performance. Useful when a single core is the bottleneck, so for large modpacks, big Factorio factories, or lots of simultaneous players.

You choose the RAM and the performance tier at creation, and the price adjusts by the started hour. If in doubt, start on Eco: it is cheaper, and the diagnosis above will tell you whether the problem was really there.

Create your server and pick the RAM that suits you.