Review from a commercial server owner - Updated
I am upon the very small amount of people who both A) Are paying users who make commercial servers while simultaneously B) Making original, unique, never-seen-before servers. I've been doing this for a while now, nearly 4 years to be precise. However, not all of my servers are finished yet. Some of them have been scrapped/abandoned, and perhaps a few blanks servers, but the vast majority are servers which are finished or playable but have no consistent playercount, making it not worth it to buy a plan. The servers could be kept alive by me for $2 a month, each. However, since I have over 65 non-paid servers, this option is impossible. It is also unfair, as most of these servers are not SMPs with lots of region, and cost Minehut a few cents monthly at most. I pay Minehut good money, so I expect my servers that I already made to not get deleted randomly without fair and *mutually agreed* compensation. I can understand restricting new users' server limits to 5, but removing existing users' servers without a mutually agreed compensation is unfair and should not even be within the question. This update brings zero benefits to paid users. It is a greedy corporate move disguised as an improvement under the guise of "unlimited server time." Yes, you can have one server with unlimited daily time, but Minehut servers are already unplayable on 1GB memory, so this is a pointless endeavor. Yes, costs must be cut, but not ones of this caliber and harm. A few possibilities/solutions to improve the situation and make it more fair: A) Don't remove servers for existing users. B) Don't remove servers for existing users so long as they maintain an active subscription for credits. C) Make a new server plan that costs very little, and only exists to prevent deletion. By "very little" I mean only a few credits a month, like 5-10. This could be also be like an archival service, where you won't be able to start the server until a proper plan is bought. D) Don't delete free servers that were bought using credits. Originally you got 50 servers to create for free, but after that, you'd have to spend 200 credits to get another. Since those servers were NOT free, and costed money, they shouldn't be deleted. At least not without compensation, which has not been mentioned thus far. E) Lastly, you could just attenuate server storage for free servers to 5GB. So far this sounds a lot like a simple complaint, so let me tell you why the update hurts Minehut. 1. Commercial server owners rarely work on a single server. We have prototypes, archived projects, event servers, testing servers, and future releases. Reducing server limits punishes the users who have invested the most time into your platform. 2. The biggest issue isn't even the limit itself. It's the fact that the rules changed after people had already invested years into building servers. If users can't trust that the servers they create today will still exist under tomorrow's policies, they're less likely to invest time or money into Minehut in the future. 3. Unlimited server time isn't even remotely close to a fair trade. Unlimited runtime sounds appealing on paper, but it's replacing something many existing users already had little use for. Commercial servers require more than 1 GB of RAM to provide a playable experience, especially for any kind of SMP, so unlimited uptime on an underpowered server isn't equivalent to losing the ability to keep dozens of projects archived. The only type of server that could potentially run on a single gigabyte is a box server with only a handful of mines and less than 8 players. 4. Migration costs: rebuilding or migrating dozens of servers elsewhere isn't a trivial task. It involves moving files, databases, plugins, configurations, and domain setups. That forces developers into situations which impose significant time costs on your most dedicated users. This update was designed around attracting new users, which is understandable. However, it comes at a large cost for unique server creators like me who have already invested years and money into the platform. It appears you're making their experience worse in exchange for new users who aren't guaranteed to pay you even a cent. Long-term users are the ones creating the content that keeps Minehut active, and updates should strengthen that relationship, not weaken it, regardless of whether or not you want new users.