Starting a new Minecraft world can be fun and exciting, until the host of the world is working, sleeping, or just touching grass. This has been the dilemma of many Minecraft worlds. You could always pay for a Minecraft realm, but this is asking to be charged for a service for a year because you forgot about it. This situation happened to me and when a group wanted to create a server, we were met with this same dilemma. I decided to take the opportunity to create an Azure virtual machine or VM and host the server there.
This allowed the group to run the server in a cloud platform rather than on a local host. It provides several advantages, like being able to stop the server so you only pay for it when you use it. You can also quickly scale the server up and down so that when usage spikes, you do not run into performance issues. These concepts are the usual suspects for moving to a cloud environment.
While there are cheaper services for hosting a Minecraft server, I used this as an opportunity to explore Azure offerings and document the initial setup. A full disclosure before we start is that there is an excellent guide that walks through the server installation of running bedrock on a Ubuntu server. You can find that article here: Bedrock Server Guide.
The first step is to set up an account at azure.microsoft.com. Azure offers a credit that can be used to test a server and is part of the reason I choose to test on azure. Once the Account is created you can start on creating a new server. Select “Create a resource” and then use “Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS”. Once the server is created you will want to connect to it via SSH.
The rest of the setup will consist of naming the machine and assigning a subscription tag for keeping track of estimated cost and server usage. For the sake of this blog post, I will just glide over these specifics and instead create a dedicated guide in the future.
Once you connect to the server via SSH you will use this great guide detailed at Bedrock Server Guide. This guide will walk you through setting up the Minecraft server files, making changes to the world settings, and then also future items like updates. This section will also get its own guide but for the time being, I would highly suggest the linked article.
The last item that the guide does not cover is setting up your networking in Azure. You will need to allow a couple of ports, 19132 and 19133. This will also be shared in the dedicated Azure guide that I will link to once it is live.
My experience has been great using Azure. I have needed to increase the server resources to meet the server demands, but within Azure, it is as simple as changing the server size and then letting Azure take care of the rest. If you have any questions feel free to use my contact form and reach out!