About Cobbly
Cobbly is free Minecraft server hosting. Anyone can create a server — no card, no trial, no expiry — and play on it with friends. This page explains who runs it, how it can be free, and what you can count on.
Who runs it
Cobbly is the free tier of Spawnly, an independent game-server host based in Portugal. Spawnly sells always-on Minecraft servers; Cobbly is the free way in. Both use the same account system and the same control panel, and the free servers are run by the same people who run the paid ones.
How it started
Spawnly began as a side project for one group of friends: a way to run and manage a single Minecraft server between us, without one person having to keep a computer switched on for everyone else. It worked well enough that we added a few other games our group played. Friends of friends started asking for servers too, so the project grew into Spawnly, a proper hosting service. Cobbly came next — a free tier for groups like the one Spawnly started with, who want a server to play on together without paying for one.
How it stays free
Free servers share hardware and sleep when nobody is playing. An empty server saves its world and stops after 5 minutes, giving its place on the machine to someone who is playing; the next person to connect wakes it again. Because most servers are empty most of the time, one machine can host many of them. The rest is paid for by ads on the website and in the panel, and by players who move up to a paid Spawnly server when they outgrow the free one.
Where your server runs
Free servers run in datacenters in Europe. While a server is asleep its world is kept in storage rather than on any one machine, so it can wake on whichever machine has room.
What you can count on
- Free means free. No card, no trial period, no time limit, and nothing that quietly starts charging.
- Fixed resources. Every free server gets the same 3 GB of memory and 10 GB of storage. The numbers do not shrink when the platform is busy.
- Your world is yours. Download it as a ZIP whenever you like, and take it to any other host.
- Written-down limits. Every limit is in the knowledge base, including the ones that are not in our favour.
- No ads in the game. Ads appear on the website and in the control panel, never inside Minecraft, and a paid perk removes them.
Get in touch
Questions about a server are usually answered fastest by the knowledge base. For anything else — a problem with your account, a partnership, or something you would rather not post in public — the support page lists how to reach the Spawnly team.