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GuidesGuidesThe honest rules of the free plan — when your server sleeps, how the Timer page brings it back, and why free is genuinely fine for playing with friends.
Free game servers on Falix are real servers — same software, same worlds, same you-and-your-friends. The one thing they don't do is run 24/7. That trips people up, so here are the straight answers: exactly when a free server stops, how to bring it back, and why, for playing with friends, none of this is a problem.
Prerequisites: none — this is the "how it actually works" article. It applies to every free game server: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, and the rest.
There are two ways a free session ends, and both are sensible once you know them.
| When | What happens | How to bring it back |
|---|---|---|
| Everyone left (empty-server stop) | About 10 minutes after the last player leaves, the server stops on its own — it's based on the player count | A player joining again cancels the countdown; otherwise start it from the panel |
| Panel can't reach it (grace timer) | A timer runs before shutdown — around 20 minutes for Minecraft, around 60 minutes for the Terraria/Factorio family | Gives a healthy server time to finish booting; revive a stopped session on the Timer page |
The empty-server stop means you can play as long as you like — the server just tidies itself away shortly after the last person logs off. The grace timer isn't something you trigger on purpose; it's headroom for a server that's still booting. That's the whole story. No hidden strikes, no daily quota — just "sleeps when empty" and "sleeps if unreachable."
When a free session has stopped or is about to, open the server's Timer page to revive or extend it. You'll:
In return you get your plan's hours added to the session. Two bonuses stack on top: when the node is low on RAM an extension may come as +1 hour at a time, and there's a weekend bonus for extra time on Saturdays and Sundays. Start the server from the panel and you're back in.
🎯 Good to know: When a free node is under heavy load, a Start can wait briefly in a queue before it actually boots, rather than starting the instant you press the button. It's not stuck — busy nodes just start servers in turn. Give it a moment.
🎯 Good to know: Uptime pingers have no effect here — the stop is based on who's playing and whether the panel can reach the server, not outside web traffic. The Timer page is the only lever.
Uptime pingers do nothing here. Services that ping a URL every few minutes to "keep a site awake" have no effect on a Falix game server — the stop is based on who's playing and whether the panel can reach the server, not on outside web traffic. Pointing an uptime service at your server won't extend the timer. The Timer page is the only lever.
⚠️ Heads up: On free servers, Minecraft's idle-kick is forced to 10 minutes — stand still and do nothing that long and you're kicked. (Premium can turn it off.)
On free servers, Minecraft's player idle-kick is forced to 10 minutes: a player who stands still and does nothing for 10 minutes gets kicked. That's deliberate — it stops one idle player from holding a whole server slot open. It doesn't affect active play at all. (Premium can turn it off.) The performance settings you'd actually want to tune, like view-distance and simulation-distance, stay fully editable on free — see Fixing Minecraft lag.
Here's the twist that pairs with the idle-kick. Because a free server stays up as long as a player is online, someone could try to park a bot or an AFK player on it to keep it running around the clock — which is exactly what free hosting isn't for. So on a free Minecraft server with players online, you'll occasionally get an in-game verification prompt: a clickable message asking you to confirm a real person is there. Click it within the time window (you get reminders) and nothing happens — you keep playing.
Miss it entirely while players are still "on", and the server is stopped — the panel reads that as nobody actually being there. It only ever fires when the server shows players, it's random and infrequent (more likely the longer a server has been up nonstop), and it never touches premium servers. For a group actually playing together, you'll click one prompt now and then and that's the end of it.
⚠️ Heads up: If you're leaving a free server running "for later" with a player idling on it, that's the case this check is built to stop. Instead, just stop it when you're done and start it again next time — that's the intended free-plan rhythm.
Here's the part that gets buried under all the rules: for playing with friends, the free plan is great. You're all online together, so the server stays up the entire time you play; it only sleeps once everyone's gone, which quietly frees resources for the next person. Waking it up again is a captcha and maybe a short ad. That's it. Countless free servers run happy little communities exactly this way.
Premium exists for a specific need: always-on. If you want the server up even when it's empty — so people can drop in at any hour, so a public community never finds it offline, with no idle-kick and no ads — that's what premium buys. It's not a better game; it's uninterrupted uptime. If your group plays in sessions, free is perfect. If your community needs the lights left on around the clock, premium is the upgrade that does that one thing.