Server Hibernation
Hibernation puts your Minecraft (Java) server to sleep automatically when nobody is playing — and wakes it back up the moment someone tries to join. Your world stays exactly as it was; the server just stops burning resources while it's empty.
Because hibernating servers count as stopped, they don't use any of your RAM pool. That means you can keep many worlds on your account and your pool only needs to cover the ones that are actually awake.
Enabling it
- Open your server in the control panel.
- Go to Settings → General.
- Turn on Auto-Hibernate When Empty.
That's it. The setting is per-server and off by default.
How it works
After 15 minutes with no players online, your server saves its world and goes to sleep. Its status in the panel shows Hibernating.
The server stays visible in the Minecraft server list while asleep. Instead of the normal MOTD, players see:
💤 Your Server is hibernating — Join to wake it up!
When someone tries to join, they briefly see:
⏳ Waking Your Server up! It will be online in about a minute — rejoin shortly.
The server starts automatically in the background. Rejoining after ~30–60 seconds lands them in the world as normal.
You can also wake a hibernating server yourself at any time with the normal Start button.
Hibernations and wake-ups are recorded in your server's activity log, so you can always see when and why the server stopped or started.
Hibernation and your RAM pool
A hibernating server frees its RAM back to your pool — you can use that RAM to run another server in the meantime.
If a player then tries to wake the hibernating server while your pool is fully in use, the wake is refused: the player sees a message that the owner's RAM pool is full, and you get a notification in the panel so you can stop another server (or add RAM) to let it wake.
Good to know
- Minecraft Java Edition only for now — the wake magic speaks the Java server-list protocol.
- The idle timer is based on players actually being connected. A server with even one player online never hibernates.
- Hibernation is a graceful stop: the world is saved before sleeping, same as a normal stop.
- The first join after waking takes about a minute (normal server start time). Everything after that is instant, as usual.
- Turning the setting off stops future auto-hibernation; a currently hibernating server can always be started manually.