Your First 10 Minutes: From Checkout to Online

You've paid, and you want to be standing in your own world before you lose interest. Here's the whole path, step by step, including the one thing that stops every first Minecraft server from starting.

1. Pick a plan

If you haven't ordered yet, pick a tier by what you're building rather than by price — our RAM guide has measured numbers. The short version: 1 GB for vanilla with a few friends, 2 GB for a plugin server or your own mod list, 3–4 GB for modpacks. Plugins can be browsed and installed from the panel on every plan; mods need 2 GB and one-click modpacks need 3 GB.

Checkout takes a card and finishes in under a minute. Nothing is manual on our side — the server is built and started automatically once payment clears, usually within a couple of minutes.

2. Watch for two emails

"Service activated" confirms your plan is live.

"Account Created" is the important one: it contains a link to set your password on panel.emeraldsmc.com. We never send a password in plain text, so this link is how you get in. Check your spam folder if it hasn't arrived within a few minutes.

Set your password, sign in, and click your server on the dashboard.

3. Accept the Minecraft EULA

Every Minecraft server, on every host, must agree to Mojang's End User Licence Agreement before it will run. Hosts can't legally accept it for you, so this step is yours.

On first boot your server writes a file called eula.txt containing eula=false, then stops. That's not a fault — it's the EULA gate, and it's why a brand-new server can look broken for a minute.

We put a banner at the top of the panel when this happens, with a button that opens the file directly. Change:

eula=false

to:

eula=true

then save. The banner disappears on its own once the file is valid. By saving that change you're agreeing to the Minecraft EULA, which is worth a skim.

4. Start the server

Hit Start on the Console tab and watch the log. A first start does real work — downloading the server jar, generating a world — so a minute or two is normal. You're looking for:

Done (98.586s)! For help, type "help"

That's your server, online.

5. Connect

Go to the Network tab and copy your IP and port — something like 148.230.94.173:26001.

In Minecraft: Multiplayer → Add Server, paste the address including the port, give it a name, and join. If the ping shows up but you can't connect, check that your Minecraft client version matches the server version.

6. Make it yours

Open server.properties in the Files tab. The settings worth changing on day one:

• motd — the line players see in their server list.
• difficulty — easy, normal or hard.
• max-players — set it to whatever you actually expect.
• view-distance — 10 by default. Dropping it to 6–8 is the cheapest performance win you'll ever get.
• white-list — set to true if you want a private server, then add people with whitelist add Name in the console.
• pvp — true or false, and you'll want to decide before people build.

Save, then restart from the Console tab so the server re-reads the file.

7. Give yourself operator

In the console, type:

op YourMinecraftName

That grants you in-game admin: /gamemode, /tp, /time set day and the rest. Do the same for anyone you trust, and remember that deop is right there when you stop trusting them.

8. Set up a nightly restart

Two minutes now, saved headaches later. On the Schedules tab, create a schedule that runs at a quiet hour with two tasks: a say Restarting in 60 seconds command, then a restart a minute later. Long-running servers drift; a daily restart keeps them fast.

What next

• Plugins and worlds: uploading with SFTP
• Everything the panel can do: a tour of your game panel
• Losing the port number: use your own domain with an SRV record
• Outgrowing your plan: how much RAM you need

Stuck at any step? Open a ticket from your billing account with your server name and what you're seeing. We answer them ourselves.