1. Hibernation economics
Intel i5 4th & 6th Gen · RAM
A Minecraft server that nobody is playing on still burns RAM, CPU cycles and electricity on a traditional host - that waste is priced into every plan. Our free tier simply refuses to pay that tax: after ~15 idle minutes we archive the world to cheap object storage, release the node, and re-allocate it on wake.
The same server can serve dozens of different worlds across a day instead of idling for one. That density is where the free 3.5 GB comes from - not from cutting corners on your data.