How to make a free Minecraft server

A free Minecraft server on Cobbly is a real server with its own address — it just sleeps when nobody is playing and shares hardware with other free servers. That is the trade that keeps it free: no card, no trial, no expiry. This guide takes you from nothing to a server your friends can join.

Create the server

1. Sign in at cobbly.net with Google or an email address.
2. Press New server.
3. Pick a name and the Minecraft version you want to run.
4. Press Create. Your server gets an address of the form yourname.cobbly.net.

You can make two servers per account. Each one is independent — its own world, version and settings.

Connect to it

In Minecraft: Multiplayer → Add Server, paste your yourname.cobbly.net address, and leave the port field empty — the address already points at the right place. Full details, including what a Sleeping status means, are in How do I connect to my server?.

Invite your friends

Share the same yourname.cobbly.net address. Anyone can add it the same way you did.

On a free server it is worth turning on the whitelist before you hand the address around: it limits who can join, and it is also checked before the server wakes, so a stranger cannot start your server and use up your slot. See Controlling who can join.

It sleeps when idle — that is normal

After 5 minutes with nobody online, the server saves its world, uploads it, and stops — that wait is fixed, shown under Configuration on the server page. The next person to connect wakes it automatically, usually in under a minute, and your world is never lost. If every shared slot is busy when it tries to wake, it joins a queue and starts on its own when one frees up — see How sleeping servers work.

Choose your server software

A new server runs Vanilla. From the Software tab, while the server is stopped, you can switch to Paper or Purpur for plugins, or a mod loader — Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, Quilt — for mods, or install a CurseForge modpack in one click. The walkthrough is How to make a modded Minecraft server.

What you get

• Two servers per account.
• 3 GB of RAM and 10 GB of storage per server.
• Up to 10 players online at once.
• The full control panel — console, file manager, server.properties editor, players and whitelist, world upload and download, backups.

The memory figure matters most for modpacks; How much RAM does a Minecraft server need? explains what 3 GB runs. The rest of the numbers are in What are the limits?.

Moving up later

If you outgrow the free tier, one button on the panel clones your world and settings into a paid Spawnly server with more memory, more storage and no sleeping. Your free server keeps running, so the move is reversible.