The question behind half of all support tickets: do I need premium? Here's the honest answer in one place. Free is a real plan — full servers, real games, real apps — and premium changes a specific, known list of things. Once you can see the whole list, the decision usually makes itself.
What free actually includes
Every application and every free-tier game runs on the free plan: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, Hytale, Discord bots, Node.js, Python, websites, databases — all of it. You get 2.5 GB of shared RAM, up to 5 managed databases, 3 subdomains, backups to your own Google Drive (uncounted), the Packages page, Git deploys, schedules, instances, SFTP, the firewall, the reverse proxy with automatic HTTPS — the platform itself is not the paywall.
The trade is time, not features: a free server runs on a session timer you extend from the Timer page (captcha, and on non-ad-free accounts a short ad), game servers stop a while after the last player leaves, and free app servers sleep when their session ends.
What premium changes
| Free | Premium | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime | Session timer; extend on the Timer page | 24/7, no timer, no ads |
| RAM / CPU | 2.5 GB shared | Your plan's own resources |
| Disk | Plan allowance | Unlimited |
| Startup command | Read-only (variables editable) | Fully editable |
| Crash detection | — | Auto-restart + health monitoring |
| Monitoring page | Upgrade prompt | Health score, charts, crash history |
| Backups | Your Google Drive, uncounted | Stored on the node, plan limit |
| Databases | 5 per server | 20 per server |
| Subdomains / ports | 3 / up to ~4 allocations | 10 / up to ~21 allocations |
| Modpacks page | Locked on newer free servers | Included |
| Transfer & clone | — | Included |
| Player idle-kick (MC) | Forced 10 minutes | Can be disabled |
Everything not in this table works the same on both plans.
🎯 Good to know: Uptime-pinger services do nothing here — the free timer isn't a sleep-on-idle timer, and the Timer page is the only lever. Don't waste an evening wiring one up.
The honest decision
- Playing games with friends in sessions? Free is genuinely fine. You're online together, the server runs while you play, and waking it up is a captcha. This is the plan most groups actually need.
- A Discord bot or website that must answer at 3 AM? That's the one thing free structurally can't do. A bot that sleeps is offline in every server it serves — always-on is what premium is.
- A busy or modded Minecraft server? 2.5 GB of shared RAM is tight for big modpacks and big player counts. If you've done the performance work and it's still starved, that's a resources problem, not a settings problem.
- A public community? Always-on plus crash detection plus monitoring is the difference between "the server is down again" and nobody noticing a crash happened.
💡 Tip: Start free, even if you suspect you'll upgrade. You'll learn the panel, build the thing, and find out what you actually need — the upgrade takes effect on a working server, not a guess.