Minecraft Server at School

[TrophyPete]

During the last 18 months, my (almost) 11 year old son has gotten quite into Minecraft and from what I can tell, he's pretty good at doing whatever he decides to do in game.  Now that he's been back in class for a week, he came to me over the weekend with the idea of starting a Minecraft Club at school with other students who are also fans of the game.  He even took the time over the day on Sunday to draft a remarkably convincing proposal on the potential benefits of the club.  Not wanting to discourage him from taking a chance or from trying something new (he's kind of shy), I've encouraged him to present his proposal to his teacher and principal.  If everything goes well and they think it's an idea that can be permitted, the inevitable question of "HOW" will certainly be the first obstacle.  I'm OK with the hardware side of PCs, but I have no knowledge whatsoever of servers or hosting games, etc and I don't want to leave him twisting in the wind if he ends up needing more help.

 

I'm sure many folks on here have experience with Minecraft servers - maybe even in  a school setting - so any advice or tips on how to get started would be most-appreciated.  He's even asked me questions already that I have no idea how to answer! Like, is Bedrock or Java Edition better for this?  Do we need to buy/build or rent server stuff?  No clue!

 

If it helps, we're located in southern Ontario, and I don't imagine there would be more than 15-25 members of this "club", and even less playing at one given time.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, TrophyPete said:

During the last 18 months, my (almost) 11 year old son has gotten quite into Minecraft and from what I can tell, he's pretty good at doing whatever he decides to do in game.  Now that he's been back in class for a week, he came to me over the weekend with the idea of starting a Minecraft Club at school with other students who are also fans of the game.  He even took the time over the day on Sunday to draft a remarkably convincing proposal on the potential benefits of the club.  Not wanting to discourage him from taking a chance or from trying something new (he's kind of shy), I've encouraged him to present his proposal to his teacher and principal.  If everything goes well and they think it's an idea that can be permitted, the inevitable question of "HOW" will certainly be the first obstacle.  I'm OK with the hardware side of PCs, but I have no knowledge whatsoever of servers or hosting games, etc and I don't want to leave him twisting in the wind if he ends up needing more help.

 

I'm sure many folks on here have experience with Minecraft servers - maybe even in  a school setting - so any advice or tips on how to get started would be most-appreciated.  He's even asked me questions already that I have no idea how to answer! Like, is Bedrock or Java Edition better for this?  Do we need to buy/build or rent server stuff?  No clue!

 

If it helps, we're located in southern Ontario, and I don't imagine there would be more than 15-25 members of this "club", and even less playing at one given time.

 

Thanks in advance.

Renting a server online is the best method.

Its 5-20 dollars a month usually, and will give good enough results, for not too much money. (if you host it at your house, your electric and internet bill will probably be through the roof.)

[rmgdnz]

Edit: Minecraft servers are single threaded, disregard my original comment.

[RONOTHAN##]

10 minutes ago, rmgdnz said:

A decent PC should be enough to host the server. Maybe something with 6 cores and 16GB RAM. You can bump memory up if needed to 32GB. I'd recommend hosting a Java server since you can easily add mods, I don't have much experience with Bedrock but from my knowledge, there are more community mods for Java.

You probably don't even need that much. Minecraft servers are very single threaded, so something dual core with 8GB of RAM should run just fine if you're not running it on Windows and you're not expecting more than 20 people. If you are, I'd think of investing in a more modern solution than an old optiplex the school might have lying around. 

 

If you do want to go the self-hosted route, look into a service called MineOS. It is free, can install on any hardware, and gives a very easy way of creating and managing Minecraft servers. I'd get an old computer, install MineOS on it, and follow the instructions to set everything up. 

 

However, unless you can get the computer for free/really cheap to host the server and have it running at the school, you're going to be better off renting some sort of server solution. There are plenty, from Realms being run by Microsoft themselves, to third party solutions offering different tiers of servers to rent. I'd look into renting a solution if you're going to do this, unless again you can contact the school's IT guy, get a decommissioned computer to run the server on, and set it up on campus (the main reason I'm stressing that you're running it on campus instead of your house is so that your public IP isn't being spread among people you don't know very well, doing that can and usually will lead to you being DDOSed).

 

EDIT: Forgot to mention the difference of Java vs. Bedrock. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Java runs on PC exclusively, is easier to manage IMO, and has greater mod support. Bedrock runs on every platform, and while it can be a bit trickier to setup, might be a better solution in the long term for this style of club. There is also the option of just hosting both types, and let people move between them as they please. 

Edited September 13, 2021 by RONOTHAN##

[Helpful Tech Witch]

6 minutes ago, rmgdnz said:

A decent PC should be enough to host the server since you don't have too many users. Maybe something with 6 cores and 16GB RAM. You can bump memory up if needed to 32GB. I'd recommend hosting a Java server since you can easily add mods, I don't have much experience with Bedrock but from my knowledge, there are more community mods for Java.

You dont need 6 cores for mc.

or even 2.

You can run a MC server on a virtual server with 1 core. ITs SOOOO single threaded.

Bedrock hosting is not as easy iirc. 

 

 

To run a system of your own, you need to port forward. Since it would be hosted at a school, their sysadmin would be insane to allow that.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

1 minute ago, RONOTHAN## said:

unless again you can contact the school's IT guy, get a decommissioned computer to run the server on, and set it up on campus (the main reason I'm stressing that you're running it on campus instead of your house is so that your public IP isn't being spread among people you don't know very well, doing that can and usually will lead to you being DDOSed).

Running it at school is a bad idea.

Having open ports can be a huge security issue, a sysadmic would be insane to allow that.

[char3327]

Java servers are much simpler to run and easier to add mods and texture packs. MC servers are very single-threaded so don't invest in a 6 core processor...a dual core will do as long as it has good single core performance. 16gb of ram should be enough but you might need to up it to 32 depending on what works.