Minecraft server glossary

The server's heartbeat. On every tick, mobs take a step, furnaces cook, redstone switches. The game aims for twenty per second, that is fifty milliseconds to recalculate everything: every farm and every plugin you add is paid for out of that budget.

Ticks per second. Twenty is right on time; below that, game time slows down for everyone at once.

It is a ceiling, not a score: an empty server and a well-tuned server both show the same twenty.

Milliseconds per tick: the time actually spent computing one heartbeat. It is the useful measure, because it moves before the TPS does.

Under fifty, the TPS still shows twenty and nothing shows: it is the margin wearing away, not yet the game slowing down. Watch it before adding a farm or a plugin, not after.

One word for two opposite problems. Server lag comes from ticks overflowing, and every player suffers it together; network lag comes from the journey to the machine, and affects only that player. The two are not fixed in the same place.

The memory Java reserves for the server, in other words the RAM of your plan: two gigabytes on Steve, twenty on Wither. The loaded world, the entities and the plugins all fit in there together.

Too small, and it runs the garbage collector in a loop; too large, and it lengthens every pass. How much RAM for your server details the calculation.

Java's garbage collector reclaims memory that is no longer in use, and every pass takes time out of the current tick. Regular stutters every few seconds, with no player spike and no visible cause: it is often the culprit.

The world is cut into columns of sixteen blocks by sixteen, from bedrock up to the sky. The server loads, computes and writes chunk by chunk: it is the unit of account for render distance, simulation and the world's weight on disk.

The chunks around the spawn point stay loaded permanently, even when nobody is there. Farm builders rely on them.

The flip side: everything left lying there is computed twenty times a second, without end. It is the first place to inspect when the MSPT climbs for no reason.

The number that seeds the terrain generator: same seed, same version, same world down to the block. Note it down before opening the server to players, it is what will let you regenerate this world elsewhere.

The world border: a square beyond which players can no longer pass, set in-game and movable at will.

It is an operating setting that pays off straight away. Without a border, the world grows with every player who heads straight ahead, and the disk of your plan runs from one to thirty gigabytes, no more.

The number of chunks the server sends around each player. It sets the visible horizon and the volume of data shipped out: going from ten to sixteen chunks more than doubles the area sent to every connected player.

The radius within which the world truly lives: mobs, crops, redstone, fluids. Beyond it, chunks stay visible but frozen.

It weighs on the processor where render distance weighs on memory and on the network. Lowering it by one or two chunks relieves the tick without changing what players see in the distance.

Mojang's official server, with nothing added: what happens there is the expected behaviour of the game. It accepts neither plugins nor mods, and to modify it without leaving it there are still datapacks.

A server that takes Vanilla and rewrites its costly parts, with a settings file for each one. It accepts Bukkit and Spigot plugins.

One click from the panel, like Spigot, CraftBukkit, Purpur, Mohist or Sponge. The page versions and modpacks goes into this choice in more detail.

The elder of the two major mod loaders. Forge mods reach deep into the game, and the client must have exactly the same ones as the server. NeoForge grew out of it and now follows its own path.

The other mod loader, lighter, and ready sooner after a Minecraft release. Forge and Fabric do not mix: the choice is made when settling the mod list, never afterwards.

Code added to the game itself: new blocks, new dimensions, new machines. It runs on the server and on the client, so every player has to install it. That is what separates a modded server from a server open to everyone.

Code added to the server alone, on Paper, Spigot or CraftBukkit: land protection, economy, ranks, anti-cheat. The player connects with an ordinary Minecraft, without installing anything.

The panel offers 18,774, installed without any file transfer. The page plugins goes into setting them up in more detail.

A list of mods already assembled, tested and versioned. Curse, Modrinth and FTB distribute them, and the panel installs them in one go. You do not sort out the conflicts yourself, but a modpack needs more memory than a Vanilla server.

Data files that a Vanilla server reads on its own: recipes, loot tables, functions, structures. No code, no installation on the player's side, and the only way to change the rules of a Vanilla world without changing engine.

The number of players connected at the same time that a server accepts, and often what a host charges for.

Here slots are unlimited on every plan, trial included: what limits you is memory and the processor, not a line in a file.

The in-game administrator rank: an OP player bypasses protections, changes the time, gives items, bans. Grant it account by account and take it back once the job is done: an OP given one evening is rarely taken back the next day.

The whitelist: only registered accounts get in, and a stranger who finds your address stays at the door. On a server among friends, it settles the question at the root, and it costs nothing in performance.

The exclusion of an account or an IP address, set from the panel console as well as in game. Banning an IP affects the whole household behind it: on a family or school server, prefer banning the account.

The number that identifies your server on the machine. Minecraft listens on 25565 by default, and a host running many of them assigns others. Your custom address already carries the port: your players type a name, nothing else.

The line shown under the server name in the multiplayer list, read before any connection. It is changed with one line in a file: it is the right place to announce maintenance or a version change.

The small service that answers questions asked from outside: server online, number of players, version. Closed, it bothers no player, but your server looks offline everywhere it is listed.

The remote console: a password-protected channel for sending commands without being in game, through which Discord bots and administration tools pass.

The panel already gives you the live console. RCON is therefore only useful if an outside tool has to talk to the server, and its password is kept like that of an administration account.

A server placed in front of the others: players connect to it, it directs them to the world they want and moves them from one to another without disconnecting. That is how a lobby, a survival and a creative world fit under a single address.

Proxies install in one click, but a proxy replaces nothing: you still need at least one server behind it.

A copy of the server's files, world included, made automatically on our side and restorable from the panel. A backup is only worth anything once restored: try it once, calmly, before you need it on an evening of griefing.

The share of time during which the service responded. It is a measurement taken after the fact, not a promise displayed in advance: ours is public, on the page showing the service status.

An attack that drowns your address under a flood of traffic until nothing gets through any more. It does not target your world, it targets the pipe.

Arbor protection is included on every server, with nothing to switch on: the details are on the page about anti-DDoS protection.