Every week I get asked "how much RAM do I actually need for my Minecraft server?" so here's the real breakdown, no fluff:

• 1-5 players, vanilla/lightly modded: 2-4GB is plenty. Anything more is wasted money.

• 5-15 players, survival + a few plugins (Essentials, WorldEdit, etc.): 6-8GB. This covers 90% of small communities.

• 15-30 players, or heavier plugin stacks (economy, custom worlds, Slimefun): 10-16GB minimum. Slimefun and chunk-loading plugins are RAM hungry.

• 30+ players or modded (Forge/Fabric packs like ATM9, RLCraft): 18-32GB+. Modpacks load way more entities/chunks than vanilla.

• Full networks (BungeeCord/Velocity + multiple backend servers): 32-64GB+ split across instances.

Common mistake: over-allocating heap. More RAM ≠ better TPS if your CPU can't keep up — Minecraft is single-threaded per world, so CPU clock speed matters more than core count for small-medium servers.

Also — Paper > Spigot > vanilla for performance, always. If you're not on Paper (or Purpur) yet, that's your free performance upgrade for today.

Been running Minecraft + VPS hosting for a while now (India/Singapore locations) — happy to help anyone figure out sizing before they buy, doesn't have to be from me. Ask away.