Free Hytale Server Hosting: What Aternos and exaroton Actually Give You, What the Stop Countdown Takes Away, and Why a Sleeping Free Server Is Recorded Offline on Every Server List

Yes, you can host a Hytale server for free. Aternos supports it, exaroton is the paid platform from the same team, and if what you want is a world for four friends on a Monday evening, a free Aternos server is the right answer. Create it, start it, paste the address into the launcher, play. Nothing in this guide should talk you out of that. If what you want is a server on a public list with a name people recognise, free hosting is the wrong answer, and the reason is not performance. A free server stops when it empties. That one mechanic, which Aternos documents openly and does not hide anywhere, is what makes free hosting excellent for a private world and unworkable for a public one. We can be specific about why, because the consequence lands in our own code. A sleeping server fails every online check a server list runs, so for most of every day it is recorded offline with zero players. That part is below, with the actual timings from the file. Chapter 1 ships on 12 October 2026, four days from now, which is why this question is being asked this week. But nothing below is Chapter 1 specific, and that is deliberate. Every piece of published documentation about free Hytale hosting was written in January and February 2026, and we will show you the dates. Can You Host a Hytale Server for Free? What Aternos Actually Offers Aternos published "Creating a free Hytale server with Aternos" on 15 January 2026, last updated 3 February 2026. Its opening line is the whole answer to the search query: Aternos now supports free Hytale gameserver hosting! The flow described on that page is short. Sign up on Aternos.org, or sign in with a Google account. Click Create Server, pick Hytale as the game, and a pre generated server address appears, which you can edit with the pencil icon next to it. Click Create. Then click Start and wait until the server is fully online before joining. Joining is the step most people get wrong, so here is the instruction in Aternos own words: Open the Hytale launcher on your PC and enter your server address (including the port). Note the parenthesis. The port is part of the address you type, not an optional extra. If you have hit a connection failure on a free host, that is the first thing to check, before anything else. Our failed to connect fix guide walks the rest of the causes in order, and if the people who cannot join are on your own network rather than on the host, the double NAT guide is the other common culprit. That is the free offer, and it is a real one. An account, a server, an address with a port, a start button. No card, no trial window that expires. The Stop Countdown Is the Mechanic That Decides Everything The Aternos "Stop countdown" page is a general platform page, not a Hytale one. It was created in April 2019 and last updated on 23 January 2026, and it names no game at all: we counted, and it mentions Hytale zero times and Minecraft zero times. It applies to your Hytale server because it describes how the Aternos platform behaves rather than how any game behaves. It is also the single most important page about free hosting, for any game, and it is written without spin. Aternos states the reason first: we have to stop empty servers without players Then it describes the timer you see on the server page: This timer tells you when your server will be stopped to free up the allocated resources for another user. And then the behaviour, which is the part worth reading twice: As soon as at least one player is on your server the timer vanishes and your server will stay online. After the last player has left your server the timer will come back and start to count down from the beginning. The page also notes that when the timer drops under a minute, a small button appears, and pressing it adds another minute, which buys you time to get in before the server stops. We are not going to give you a duration in minutes. Aternos does not publish one on that page, and we have not measured it ourselves. The duration is not the point anyway. The shape is: occupied means online, empty means a countdown, and the countdown resets to full every time somebody leaves rather than carrying over. For a private world this is not a flaw, it is good engineering. Your server exists while you are using it and releases hardware when you are not. Nobody loses anything, because nobody is looking at it while it sleeps. What a Sleeping Server Looks Like to a Server List Here is the part no host blog can write, because the code is ours. HytaleCharts decides whether a server is online in three steps, in order. The logic lives in app/Models/Server.php, in getIsOnlineAttribute(): Priority 1, an external query endpoint. If a server has one configured, we trust it only when the last successful query was within the last 10 minutes. Older than that and the result is not used. Priority 2, the heartbeat plugin. If a server has a heartbeat secret, we treat it as online when the last heartbeat arrived within the last 5 minutes. A stale heartbeat does not report offline, it falls through to the next check, which is deliberate: a plugin going quiet should not be able to mark a running server dead. Priority 3, the stored ping result. The UDP and QUIC ping value, refreshed by the servers:ping scheduled task every 5 minutes. A stopped server fails all three. Nothing answers the query endpoint. The plugin is not running, so no heartbeat arrives. The ping finds nothing listening. Every five minutes, for the whole time the server is asleep, the stored record says offline with zero players. That is the detection behaviour. Here is our conclusion from it, stated separately because it is a conclusion rather than a fact from the code: across a full day, a server that only runs while its owner is playing accumulates a player-count history and an uptime record that are mostly a record of being asleep. Those two signals are exactly what a server list sorts and ranks on. We are not going to put a number on the effect, name a weight in a formula, or promise you a position, because none of that would be honest. The factual part is narrow and sufficient: the data your listing collects about you is collected on a five minute cycle that does not pause while your server is stopped. There is an asymmetry underneath all of this. A private server being empty when nobody is playing costs you nothing, because the only people who would notice are the people not playing. A public listing is looked at continuously by strangers, and statistically the moment they look is a moment you are asleep. If you want the player count on your listing to be real rather than a guess, our online status and player count setup guide covers the three detection paths from the server owner side, including which one to use if you cannot install a plugin. And if you are weighing whether to list at all, how to list your server covers what that route expects of you before you commit to it. The Queue, and Why a Free Server Does Not Come Back Unattended The second structural limit is on the Aternos "Queue" page, another general platform page rather than a Hytale guide, created April 2019 and last updated 23 January 2026. Like the stop countdown page it mentions neither Hytale nor Minecraft, because it is describing the platform. It opens with the condition: When our servers are at full capacity, you'll join a queue before your server starts. The page explains that you see your position and an estimated wait, and that a red stop button lets you leave the queue at any time, but leaving means losing your position. Then comes the clause that matters most for anybody thinking about availability: As you approach the front of the queue, a confirmation screen appears with a green button. You must click the button to finally start your server. If you don't confirm, you're removed from the queue and must start over. Aternos gives the reason in the same paragraph: the confirmation proves you are still there and actually want the server, and without it they would waste resources starting servers for inactive players. That is a sensible rule for a free platform. It is also, read from the server owner side, a human in the loop requirement. Our reading: starting a free server is an attended action, not an automated one. Combine that with the stop countdown and you get the real constraint. When your server empties, it stops. When it stops, somebody has to be at a browser to bring it back. If there is a queue, that somebody has to still be at the browser when the green button appears. Availability on a free host is therefore a function of whether a person is sitting at the dashboard, which is fine for a scheduled session with friends and impossible for a listing that strangers click at three in the morning. We are not publishing queue lengths or wait times. We have not measured them, and anyone quoting you a figure for Hytale specifically should be asked where it came from. RAM: Aternos Publishes No Hytale Allocation at All We went looking for the free Hytale RAM figure, and what we found was an absence. The absence is the finding, so here it is in detail. The Aternos "Server RAM" page is the third of these general platform pages, created in July 2023 and last updated on 23 January 2026. That is the reason it names no Hytale figure: it is a general page still written around Minecraft, and the January revision did not change that. Under the heading "How much RAM do I get on Aternos?" it says: The amount of memory assigned to your server depends on which software and version you use. A Vanilla 1.20.1 Server for example receives 2400 MB of RAM. We measured that page today. The word Hytale appears zero times on it. Minecraft appears four times. The only memory figure anywhere on the page is that 2400 MB, and it belongs to a Minecraft server. So Aternos has not published a Hytale RAM allocation. Do not carry 2400 MB across to Hytale, and do not accept it from anybody else either. The page tells you where the real number lives: the amount currently assigned to your server is shown in the server section of the panel while the server is online. That is the only figure that will be true for your server, and you have to start it to see it. You will find Hytale RAM recommendations on hosting provider blogs, usually a floor figure plus a per player tier. We are leaving those out on purpose. They are unverified third party host guidance published by companies that sell RAM, not official allocations from Aternos or from Hypixel Studios, and we have not confirmed any of them. If you want our own view of what a Hytale server needs, it is in our server hosting setup and requirements guide, with the sourcing shown. The Medal Clip Boost Is the Only Published Lever on Free RAM There is exactly one documented way to add RAM to a free Aternos server, and unlike the Server RAM page, this one does name Hytale. It is also a general Aternos page rather than a Hytale guide, and it is older than any of them: "Boost your server ram" was created on 29 October 2025 and updated on 2 February 2026, which is the revision that brought Hytale clips into it. It says: When you upload a Minecraft or Hytale clip through the Medal app, you can claim a free 500 MB RAM boost for your Aternos server that lasts 7 days. You can repeat this process every week and stack up to 5 active boosts, giving your server up to 2.5 GB of extra RAM. The mechanics, as that page documents them: Medal.tv is Windows only. The page states this explicitly. If you are on macOS or Linux, this route is closed to you. Install the Medal app on your PC, create an account, and log in. Record a clip with F8. Go back into your Minecraft or Hytale client and press F8. Capturing a video is what makes you eligible. Claim it in Quests. Open the Medal app, go to the Quests section in the left sidebar, find the Aternos RAM Boost quest, and enter your Aternos server IP address when prompted. Restart the server to activate the additional RAM. The boost applies automatically for 7 days once submitted. Two observations of our own. First, this is a weekly chore. Each boost lasts 7 days and you can stack up to 5, so the 2.5 GB ceiling only holds if you keep feeding it, every week, without missing one. Second, 500 MB is an increment on a base number that Aternos does not publish for Hytale, which means you cannot calculate your total in advance. You can only start the server and read the panel. If RAM or CPU pressure is your actual problem rather than your theoretical one, the fix usually is not more memory. Our write up of the open source Performance Saver plugin, its TPS limiter and its dynamic view radius covers the levers that matter when a handful of players are each exploring in a different direction, and view radius is usually the one that moves the needle. The Good News: Hytale Mods Are Server Side Only This is the strongest argument for free hosting, it is genuinely non obvious, and it is easy to miss because it is buried in a how to page. From the Aternos page "Install mods on your Hytale server", created 15 January 2026, last updated 23 January 2026: Mods on Hytale are server-side only, which means your players don't need to install anything on their client to join your modded server. Read what that does for a free server. You can run a modded world, and your friends join with an unmodified launcher. No pack to distribute. No version mismatch. No support thread that is 40 messages of "install this first". The friction that normally keeps casual players out of modded servers is not there, and that benefit is available on the free tier at no cost at all. On where the mods come from, the same page says: Aternos offers a wide selection of mods uploaded to CurseForge, the official modding platform for Hytale. Make sure your server is offline before installing mods. You search the mods page, press Install, and restart the server. For files you supply yourself, the page's literal phrasing is this, and we are quoting it as written rather than tidying it: You can upload .zip files mods through our Files page In practice: open your server's Files page, drag the mod into the /mods folder or use the upload button, then restart to apply it. Note the pattern in those instructions, because it repeats everywhere on a free host. Make sure the server is offline before installing. Restart to apply. Restart to activate the RAM boost. Click the green button to start. Almost every change on a free server is an operation a person performs by hand, in between sleeps. Our guide to installing and managing Hytale server mods covers the same job on a server you control, where those steps can be scripted. Every Free Hytale Hosting Guide Was Written in the Second Half of January 2026 This is a counted finding rather than an impression. Aternos has nine help articles with Hytale in the title. All nine were created between 15 and 23 January 2026, and exactly one of them has been touched since, on 3 February 2026. Here is every date: Aternos Hytale articleCreatedLast updated Become an Admin (op) on your Hytale server15 January 202623 January 2026 Enable whitelist on your Hytale server15 January 202623 January 2026 Install mods on your Hytale server15 January 202623 January 2026 Creating a free Hytale server with Aternos15 January 20263 February 2026 Enable PVP on your Hytale server16 January 202616 January 2026 Change the death penalty of your Hytale server16 January 202623 January 2026 Connect to your Hytale server19 January 202623 January 2026 Failed to connect to Hytale server19 January 202623 January 2026 Upload your Hytale world or universe23 January 202623 January 2026 The three pages carrying the actual limits are not in that list, because they are not Hytale articles. "Stop countdown", "Queue" and "Server RAM" are general Aternos platform pages, all three last updated 23 January 2026, and they apply to a Hytale server by describing the platform rather than the game. The Medal RAM boost page, "Boost your server ram", is a fourth general page, older than any of the Hytale guides at 29 October 2025, updated 2 February 2026 to include Hytale clips. exaroton has exactly five Hytale titled articles, created between 15 and 26 January 2026, and none of them has been touched since 26 January 2026: exaroton Hytale articleCreatedLast updated Install mods on your Hytale server15 January 202623 January 2026 Enable whitelist on your Hytale server15 January 202626 January 2026 Connect to your exaroton Hytale server19 January 202623 January 2026 Become an Admin (op) on your Hytale server26 January 202626 January 2026 Upload your Hytale world or universe26 January 202626 January 2026 In one sentence: Aternos has nine Hytale guides, all written in the second half of January 2026, and only one has been touched since, on 3 February 2026; exaroton has five, and none has been touched since 26 January 2026. That is eight months and four game updates ago. Our conclusion: the free hosting documentation for Hytale was written during the early access window and has not been revised through Update 5, Update 6, Update 7 or Chapter 1. That is not a criticism of either host, and it does not make any of it wrong. It does mean two things for you. Treat the platform mechanics as stable. The stop countdown, the queue, the Medal boost and the Files page are Aternos behaviour, not Hytale behaviour, and there is no reason a game update would change them. Treat anything version specific with suspicion. Nothing in those pages has been tested in public against the build shipping on 12 October, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We also will not tell you what Chapter 1 will require of a server, because the pre-release line ended and nobody outside the studio has the build. The practical use of this section is defensive. If you find an article that presents January documentation as current Chapter 1 free hosting guidance, complete with RAM figures and startup times, you now know how old the underlying material is. When to Move Up, and to What exaroton is the paid platform from the same team, and the interesting thing is that the two Aternos pages describing free limits both point at it in their own words. Aternos is unusually direct about which limitation exaroton removes. On the Stop countdown page, under the heading about keeping your server online longer: exaroton offers adjustable uptime, advanced features, and full support for custom mods and plugins, developed and run by the Aternos team. On the Queue page, under the heading about skipping the queue: exaroton has no queue, file upload capabilities, more advanced features, and complete control over your server. Those two quotes map exactly onto the two problems in this article. Adjustable uptime answers the stop countdown. No queue answers the attended start. If you are moving up specifically because your server needs to be reachable when you are not at a keyboard, that is the pairing to read. We are not quoting prices for exaroton or for anyone else, because we have not verified them and pricing pages change. Go and read the current page yourself before you budget. Free is also not the only alternative to a monthly bill. Our comparison of self hosted against managed Hytale hosting covers the three paid shapes in detail, and free is best understood as the missing fourth option in that comparison: the one with the lowest cost and the least control. If you want the general version of the whole decision, start at our Hytale server hosting guide. One thing to do whichever tier you land on: hand players an address you own, not a generated one. If you move hosts later, a server address that belongs to the host moves with the host rather than with you, and every Discord message, video description and listing that contains it goes stale at once. Our SRV records and custom domain guide covers the record types and the port question, which is the same port the Aternos join instruction tells you to type. Free Is Right for This, Wrong for That The honest verdict, written as a table rather than a recommendation, because the correct answer depends entirely on what you are building. What you wantFree hostWhy A world for you and a handful of friends, played in sessionsRight choiceThe stop countdown costs you nothing when everyone arrives together To try mods before committing to anythingRight choiceMods are server-side only, so friends join with an unmodified client A private whitelisted world for a small groupRight choiceSmall, attended, no public expectations A server you want found on a public listWrong choiceA stopped server fails all three online checks, every five minutes Players joining at hours you are not onlineWrong choiceStarting a free server needs somebody to press the green button An uptime record that means somethingWrong choiceThe record will reflect sleep, because that is what the pings find Running a launch weekend with strangers arrivingWrong choiceEvery recovery is an attended operation, possibly behind a queue Compressed into one line: free hosting is correct when the players and the operator are the same people, and wrong as soon as they are not. If you are on the wrong side of that line and wondering whether it matters, the retention side of the question is worth reading too. Our piece on why players leave a Hytale server and the longer guide to growing a server and getting more players both start from the same assumption: that a player who tries to join and finds nothing there does not come back for a second attempt. Frequently Asked Questions Is Hytale server hosting free? It can be. Aternos announced free Hytale hosting on 15 January 2026 with the line "Aternos now supports free Hytale gameserver hosting!" and it is free without a card or a trial window. The cost is paid in uptime: empty servers are stopped, and starting one again is something a person has to do. Can you host a Hytale server for free, properly? For a private world, yes, properly and permanently. For a public server that strangers are supposed to be able to join at any hour, no, and the obstacle is the stop countdown rather than performance or player slots. How do I create a free Hytale server? Per the Aternos guide: sign up on Aternos.org or sign in with Google, click Create Server, select Hytale, edit the pre generated address if you want to, click Create, then click Start and wait until the server is fully online. To join, "Open the Hytale launcher on your PC and enter your server address (including the port)." Why does my Aternos Hytale server keep stopping? Because it is empty. Aternos states "we have to stop empty servers without players", and describes the behaviour exactly: the timer vanishes when at least one player is on, and "After the last player has left your server the timer will come back and start to count down from the beginning." It is working as designed. My Aternos Hytale server is not working, or says failed to connect. What now? Check three things in this order. Is the server actually started, or has it stopped itself because it was empty. Did you include the port in the address, which the Aternos join instruction says to do. And is the failure on the host side at all, rather than on your own network. Aternos does publish a page called "Failed to connect to Hytale server", created 19 January 2026 and last updated 23 January 2026, so start there for platform specific causes. Our failed to connect guide covers the rest. Why is my Aternos Hytale server lagging? We cannot diagnose a platform we have not run. What we can tell you is that Aternos publishes no Hytale RAM allocation, so you cannot reason about headroom without starting the server and reading the figure in the server section of the panel. If the symptom is a few players exploring in different directions, read our Performance Saver and view radius write up first, because view radius is usually the lever, not memory. How much RAM does a free Aternos Hytale server get? Aternos has not published a figure. We measured the Server RAM page: Hytale appears on it zero times, Minecraft appears four times, and the only memory number on it is 2400 MB for a Vanilla 1.20.1 Minecraft server. Anybody quoting you a Hytale number from Aternos is quoting something that is not there. Can you install mods on a free Hytale server? Yes. Aternos documents installing from CurseForge and uploading .zip files to the /mods folder through the Files page, with the server offline, then a restart. And per the same page, "Mods on Hytale are server-side only, which means your players don't need to install anything on their client to join your modded server." Can I run a Hytale server 24/7 for free, or keep it always on? Not on Aternos, by design, because empty servers are stopped to free resources for other users. Aternos itself points at exaroton for this, saying it "offers adjustable uptime, advanced features, and full support for custom mods and plugins, developed and run by the Aternos team." Is there a Hytale server free trial? Aternos is not a trial, it is a free tier with no expiry and a stop countdown. Several paid hosts advertise trials, and we have not verified any of their terms, so check the terms yourself rather than taking a figure from an article. Should I use Aternos or exaroton for Hytale? Aternos if the players are you and your friends and you are happy to press Start. exaroton if the server has to be up when you are not there, by Aternos own description of it, which cites no queue and adjustable uptime. They are run by the same team, so this is a tier decision rather than a host decision. Will a free Hytale server show as online on a server list? Only while it is running. On HytaleCharts, online status comes from an external query endpoint trusted for 10 minutes, then a heartbeat trusted for 5 minutes, then a stored UDP or QUIC ping refreshed every 5 minutes by a scheduled task. A stopped server fails all three and is recorded offline with zero players until it starts again. Can I whitelist a free Hytale server? Both platforms publish a page for it. Aternos "Enable whitelist on your Hytale server" was created on 15 January 2026, and exaroton has its own version from the same week. Neither has been revised since January. For the general approach to access control and permissions on a Hytale server, including what a whitelist does and does not protect, see our whitelist and access control guide. What We Have Not Tested Stated plainly, because this is a topic where host blogs publish numbers they did not measure. Nobody here has run a Hytale server on Aternos or exaroton. No account, no test server, no benchmark. There are no measured figures of ours anywhere in this article. No start times, queue lengths, sleep timer durations or uptime percentages. We have not measured any of them, so we have not published any of them. No prices or plan contents for exaroton or anyone else. Unverified, and they change. No Aternos RAM figure for Hytale, because there is not one to report. The absence is the finding, not a gap we filled in. No third party RAM tiering. Hosting provider blogs publish Hytale RAM floors and per player tiers. Those are unverified third party host guidance from companies selling RAM, and they are deliberately left out. No confirmation that the January documentation matches the Chapter 1 build. Nobody outside the studio has it, and the pre-release line ended, which we covered in our piece on there being no pre-release today. No endorsement claims. Nothing here should be read as Hypixel Studios endorsing, partnering with or recommending any host. Everything attributed to Aternos above came from its own help centre, read today, with each page's creation and revision dates given alongside the quote. Everything attributed to our own behaviour came from the file and line we named. The Bottom Line Free Hytale hosting is real, it is not a trick, and for the use case it was built for it is better than paying. Aternos gives you a server, an address with a port, CurseForge mods your friends do not have to install, and a Medal clip route to 500 MB of extra RAM a week. Nothing about it is cheap in the bad sense. What it does not give you is a server that exists when you are not in it. Aternos says so directly, in a page that has been live since 2019: empty servers are stopped, and the countdown restarts from the beginning the moment the last player leaves. Starting it again needs a person, and sometimes a person who waits for a green button. That is the whole decision. If the people playing are the people running it, use the free tier and spend nothing. If you want strangers to find your server, join it at an hour you are asleep, and come back a second time, then you are buying uptime, and uptime is the one thing a free host is explicit about not selling. Further reading: our self hosted against managed hosting comparison for the three paid paths, the online status and player count setup guide for getting your listing to report something true once you have a server that stays up.