EDIT 1-3-21

Given the popularity of this post I decided to give Realms another trial. As of today, the saves on realm have starting to corrupt, costing players both inventory and building. All below issues are still in play. I would highly recommend players use MC ProHosting: mcprohosting.com/

EDIT - 5-19-19

For some reason, over the past five years this post has garnered nearly 100k views, and still gets a couple hundred a day. For the sake of ensuring clarity, I did a little digging and found that all information I presented is still true. I also learned that realms only allows you to upload worlds 500 MB or smaller.

Realms will uninvite inactive players.
Realms is more expensive than other hosting servers.
Realms servers are still not moddable.
Yes, you can rent a server with 100% uptime that will allow instant joining
Realms still has autokick.

All that being said, the price for realms as dropped to $7.99.

Realms have gone through virtually no changes since their inception, and should only be used by people who are afraid to do the very limited work and research it takes to rent or host a server. Five years later, even at a lower price it is still a ripoff.


_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_


Having used Realms for two months, I can confidently say that it was a poor experience. I am writing this in hopes that aspiring server owners don't make the same mistakes I did. I'll cut to the chase right away.

There are several elements to Realms that are not necessarily presented upfront. In fact, Mojang completely neglected to tell ANYBODY about one of the main features of Realms: Uninviting your friends.

At the get-go, I had invited a healthy list of twelve different friends to play on our world. During the first month not all of them got around to playing on the server. When I went to invite a new friend about three weeks into playing Realms, I noticed my whitelist had dropped from 12/20 to 9/20.

THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. Basically, Realms decided, arbitrarily and without my permission, to literally axe people who hadn’t played. Later on, after re-inviting those friends that had been axed, I realized that the timeline was even shorter than three weeks. I can’t give an exact number, but it was more along the lines of two weeks.

The reason for this is simple:

When no one is logged on to your Realms Server, it gets shut down. This is done in order to save Mojang money. The less people are whitelisted, the less people can play and therefore ‘turn on’ your Realm.

This is also the reason you can only invite 20 people to actually play. This might not seem like a big deal, but I can almost promise that you will NOT have all 10 slots full at any time, and if you do those occasions will be extremely rare.

This is also the reason Realms will kick you off after a few minutes of inactivity. You can’t step away from your game to let crops grow or ores smelt. Another important point is that the Realm will shut down entirely when no one is playing, and takes a long period of time to boot back up when a player joins an empty realm.

Mojang is attempting to make sure your Realm has as little uptime as possible.


My Current Server –
Cost: $5.00/month
Slot Limit: 12
Whitelist Limit: No Limit
Auto-kick: No Auto-kick
Server Startup: Instant


Realms Server –
Cost: $13.00/month
Slot Limit: 10
Whitelist Limit: 20
Auto-kick: ~10 Minutes
Server Startup: 10-30 Seconds

Realms has been designed to make server hosting ‘easier’. I won’t deny that the user interface is nifty, and it feels nice. But ultimately I became frustrated with all the little things that Realms did in order to pinch pennies. On my new server there I zero downtime, so I can join instantly. With Realms I had to wait for the server to boot up if nobody was on yet. I also might add that I experience less lag on the $5.00 server than on realms.

These all seem like minor inconveniences. And really, I wouldn’t have minded if Realms hadn’t cost me nearly three times more than my current server. And as I’ve shown you, the server I’ve moved to is already significantly better.

Anyone using realms is being ripped off as we speak. They cut corners and charge three times as much as a similar server. For $15.00/month is could have 30 slots with my current host. That’s only two bucks more expensive than Realms!

Yes, Realms is marginally easier, but you're paying for a fancy GUI for a server you cannot mod. Take a little time and learn how to run a real server, and your wallet will thank me. I'm willing to bet your players will, too