A game server VPS you pay for in crypto, with no account verification

Forget marketing core counts. Three things decide whether your server runs clean:

• Single-thread CPU. The authoritative tick of most games is one busy thread. If that thread can't finish its work inside the tick budget (50 ms for Minecraft's 20 TPS, ~15.6 ms for a 64-tick Source server), players feel rubber-banding and lag spikes. A high-clock EPYC core matters far more than eight slow ones.
• RAM. Game worlds, chunk/region caches, and JVM heaps live in memory. Undersize it and you get GC pauses (Minecraft) or swapping to disk, which is fatal for tick timing. Size RAM to the game and player count, then leave headroom.
• Network latency, not just bandwidth. Bandwidth per player is tiny (tens of KB/s). What players notice is round-trip latency. That is why region choice — picking the datacenter closest to your players — is the single biggest lever you have.

Storage matters less for live play but helps load times and world saves: every NoKycVPS plan ships NVMe (Gen5 on the S1), so chunk loads and save flushes are fast. IOPS spikes during world saves won't stall the tick.

Use this as a starting point and scale up if you add mods or players. RAM figures assume a dedicated game server with normal OS overhead; modpacks and high mob counts push RAM up fast.

If you're consistently at the top of the S3 envelope, jump to a dedicated R1 (Ryzen 9 7950X, 16c/32t, 64 GB ECC, from $89/mo): no noisy neighbours, the highest single-thread clocks, and 10 Gbps unmetered.

Same hardware lives in all four regions, so choose the one closest to most of your players. Latency is the only differentiator for play quality:

• Paris (PAR) — central Western Europe, dense peering, lowest base price. Best default for a EU-wide audience.
• Bucharest (OTP) — strong connectivity for Eastern Europe / the Balkans / Turkey, lowest-latency choice for that player base.
• Zurich (ZRH) — Central Europe, ideal for DACH players; also the strongest privacy jurisdiction (outside 14-Eyes, FADP).
• Reykjavik (REK) — North Atlantic; a reasonable midpoint for mixed EU/North-America groups and renewable-powered.

Don't guess. Spin up the cheapest plan in two candidate regions, run mtr your.server.ip from a couple of players' machines, compare, then deploy the real server where the median ping is lowest. Because deploys take ~47 seconds and you pay from balance, this test costs cents. See the jurisdiction pages for the legal angle on each location.

Deploy an S2 Pro in your nearest region with Debian 13, then:

# as a non-root user with sudo
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y openjdk-21-jre-headless screen
sudo useradd -m -r -s /bin/bash mc
sudo -iu mc
mkdir server && cd server
# download Paper (replace with current build URL)
wget -O server.jar https://api.papermc.io/v2/projects/paper/...
echo 'eula=true' > eula.txt
# allocate heap; leave RAM for the OS — on 16 GB use ~10G
java -Xms10G -Xmx10G -jar server.jar --nogui

Open the port in the firewall (sudo ufw allow 25565/tcp) and run it under systemd or screen so it survives logout. The same pattern applies to other games: install runtime, create an unprivileged user, open the port, supervise the process. Keep backups of your world directory off the box.

Pay in crypto, monthly, no lock-in. Top up your balance with any of 10 coins — Bitcoin, Monero (XMR), Litecoin, Ethereum, USDT-TRC20, USDC, Solana, Tron, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash — and deploys debit it. XMR credits in about 30 seconds, BTC in a few minutes. There is no auto-renew: each cycle is a one-shot you choose to renew. Longer commitments cut the bill hard — 25% off at 3 months, 35% at 6, 50% at 12 — and topping up earns a bonus (+30% at $100, up to +70% at $1000). A test box for a weekend tournament can be paid for and torn down without a card ever touching the order.

DDoS. Game servers attract attacks. Plan accordingly: keep the server IP off public chat where possible, fronting nothing you don't have to, and consider a reverse-proxy or UDP-aware filtering layer for high-profile public servers. The network runs up to 10 Gbps unmetered, which absorbs nuisance-level floods, but a determined volumetric attack against any single VPS needs application-aware mitigation — design for it rather than assume it away.

Privacy. No KYC means email + password is the entire credential; disposable email is fine, there is no ID, phone, or email verification. Root passwords are AES-256 encrypted at rest, there is no proactive content monitoring, and the operator acts only on a binding court order from a court with jurisdiction over the Saint Kitts and Nevis entity — and notifies you first. A warrant canary is published monthly. Gaming communities that don't want their hosting tied to a real-world identity get exactly that.