Apex vs Shockbyte vs Nodecraft: $4 Gap at 4GB [2026]

Anyone who has tried to keep a Minecraft world alive past a group chat’s first burst of enthusiasm knows the real bottleneck isn’t the game. It’s the server. Self-hosting off a spare laptop dies the moment someone closes their lid, and renting raw cloud compute means learning firewall rules just to let five friends build a base together. That gap is exactly what Apex Hosting, Shockbyte, and Nodecraft exist to fill, and in September 2026 all three are fighting over the same crowded market of players who want a server that stays up without a systems administration degree.

These three names come up constantly in the same breath because they solve the same problem in different ways. Apex Hosting, founded in 2013, built its reputation on modpack-friendly Minecraft servers and has since branched into two dozen other titles. Shockbyte, also launched in 2013 by founder Mitch Smith, has grown into the largest of the three by review volume, a scale confirmed by its own Trustpilot business profile. Nodecraft, the oldest of the group at a 2012 founding in Oklahoma City, took a different bet entirely: sell server slots that can switch games on demand instead of locking customers into a single title.

All three grew up solving the same starting problem: Minecraft’s explosion in the mid-2010s created millions of players who wanted a persistent world without babysitting a machine themselves. More than a decade later, that core business has splintered into three distinct strategies, and the differences between them matter a lot more once a buyer moves past a single vanilla server and starts asking about modpacks, DDoS resilience, or running something other than Minecraft entirely.

This comparison pulls pricing straight from each provider’s current plans, checks control-panel claims against independent reviews, and stacks up setup speed, DDoS protection, and Trustpilot scores side by side. It also covers which games each host actually runs beyond Minecraft, since that detail changes fast and older reviews get it wrong more often than you’d expect.

Why Managed Game Server Hosting Still Beats Self-Hosting in 2026

Running a Minecraft or Palworld server yourself is not hard in the sense of typing commands. It’s hard in the sense of everything else: port forwarding through a home router, keeping a machine powered on 24 hours a day, restoring a world after a bad plugin crashes it at 2 a.m., and explaining to a router why it needs to expose a port to the open internet. Managed game server hosting strips out every one of those steps in exchange for a monthly fee tied to how much RAM the server gets.

That trade only makes sense if the host is fast, reliable, and not wildly overpriced for what a home PC could technically do for free. Apex Hosting, Shockbyte, and Nodecraft each answer that question differently. Apex leans on a polished control panel and a long list of supported mods. Shockbyte leans on rock-bottom pricing and a genuinely huge non-Minecraft game catalog. Nodecraft leans on speed and a feature called Save & Swap that lets one plan run Minecraft this month and Valheim the next without buying a second server.

For readers weighing this against building their own box, related guides on this site cover the DIY side too, including how to run a Palworld cloud server without opening a single port and how Pterodactyl handles multi-game hosting for anyone who wants full control instead of a managed panel.

Apex Hosting vs Shockbyte vs Nodecraft: Full Spec Comparison

Here’s how the three providers stack up across the metrics that actually change day-to-day server ownership, from control panel type to how long a support ticket sits before someone answers it.

Metric	Apex Hosting	Shockbyte	Nodecraft
Founded	2013	2013	2012
Control panel	Custom-skinned Multicraft with MCShield	Multicraft, budget-themed	Proprietary NodePanel
Claimed setup time	Under 5 minutes	“Instant,” tested at 2 to 5 minutes	Under 60 seconds
Trustpilot rating	4.7 / 5	4.0 / 5	4.9 / 5
Trustpilot review count	~8,120	~10,170	~1,787
Non-Minecraft games	20+ (ARK, Rust, Valheim, CS2, Palworld, more)	60+ advertised, official Rust partner	Wide catalog with game-swap feature
DDoS protection	Included, mitigates up to 300 Gbps	Included on all plans	Included, network-level
Backups	Automated daily offsite + manual	User-scheduled automatic + manual, one-click restore	Manual + automated tasks, lockable backups
Live chat support	24/7	Web ticket portal (chat unclear)	24/7
Phone support	No	No	Yes, limited overnight US hours
Money-back guarantee	7 days	Varies by promotion	Refund policy on request
Uptime target	99.9% to 99.99%	99.9%	99.9%

The Trustpilot numbers deserve a second look before anyone treats them as a simple ranking. Nodecraft’s 4.9 score looks like a clean win until you notice it rests on roughly 1,787 reviews, compared with Shockbyte’s 10,170 and Apex’s 8,120. A smaller, more engaged customer base can post a higher average score more easily than a provider serving ten times as many accounts. None of that makes Nodecraft’s rating fake, but it does mean the comparison isn’t apples to apples, and it’s worth weighing scale alongside score.

Pricing Breakdown: What Each RAM Tier Actually Costs

Apex and Shockbyte both sell Minecraft hosting in clean RAM tiers, which makes them directly comparable. Nodecraft does things differently: instead of a fixed ladder of GB-labeled plans, it prices by hardware tier, with a Budget package running close to $3 per GB and a Premium package closer to $5 per GB, a breakdown that shows up consistently across third-party Nodecraft testing. The table below uses that per-GB rate to build comparable Nodecraft Budget-tier prices next to Apex and Shockbyte’s published plans.

RAM	Apex Hosting	Shockbyte	Nodecraft (Budget tier, est.)
1 GB	$4.49/mo	$3.99/mo	~$3.00/mo
2 GB	$7.49/mo	$7.99/mo	~$6.00/mo
3 GB	$11.24/mo	$11.99/mo	~$9.00/mo
4 GB	$14.99/mo	$15.99/mo	~$12.00/mo
6 GB	$22.49/mo	$23.99/mo	~$18.00/mo
8 GB	$29.99/mo	$31.99/mo	~$24.00/mo
10 GB	$37.49/mo	$39.99/mo	~$30.00/mo
16 GB	$51.99/mo	$63.99/mo	~$48.00/mo

At the 4 GB mark, the sweet spot for a small modded server with a handful of plugins, the gap between the cheapest and priciest of the three lands right around $4, with Nodecraft’s Budget tier estimate underneath both Apex and Shockbyte, and Shockbyte running the highest at $15.99. That gap widens fast at higher RAM tiers: by 16 GB, Shockbyte’s Titan plan at $63.99 costs nearly $16 more per month than the Nodecraft Budget estimate. Apex sits in between at every tier tested here, never the cheapest and never the most expensive.

Two caveats matter here. First, Nodecraft’s numbers are estimates built from a published per-GB rate rather than a fixed plan you click and buy, since the company’s own homepage advertises plans “starting at $9.98 per month” for its lowest standard tier rather than a 1 GB line item. Second, Shockbyte runs frequent promotions, commonly 30% off the first month, which can drop that $15.99 4 GB plan closer to $11.19 for a customer’s opening bill before it reverts to the regular rate.

Apex Hosting: The Modpack-Friendly Veteran

Apex built its name on Minecraft, and modded Minecraft specifically. The company’s control panel, a heavily modified version of Multicraft, includes one-click installers for popular modpacks like FTB, Pixelmon, and SkyFactory, plus a security layer it calls MCShield that filters common attack patterns aimed at Minecraft servers on top of network-level DDoS mitigation rated up to 300 Gbps, per Guru99’s testing.

What surprises people who haven’t checked Apex’s catalog recently is how far past Minecraft it now reaches. According to the company’s own features page and corroborating reviews, Apex now supports ARK: Survival Evolved and Ascended, Rust, Valheim, Counter-Strike 2, Conan Exiles, Terraria, Project Zomboid, Satisfactory, 7 Days to Die, Factorio, and Palworld, alongside a longer tail of smaller titles. That’s a meaningfully broader lineup than Apex had even two years ago, and it undercuts the older reputation of the company as a Minecraft-only shop.

Setup takes under five minutes according to Apex’s own marketing, a claim Website Planet’s review backs up in practice. Backups run automatically once a day and offsite, with the option to trigger a manual backup or schedule additional ones through the panel, though neither Apex nor the reviews checked here disclose exactly how long backups are retained before rotation. Support runs 24/7 through live chat and a ticket system, with no phone line, and a seven-day money-back guarantee covers first-time customers who back out early.

Shockbyte: Biggest Catalog, Biggest Review Base, Tightest Margins

Shockbyte’s pitch is volume. It advertises hosting for more than 60 games, and it holds an official partnership with Facepunch Studios to run Rust dedicated servers, a status confirmed on Facepunch’s own support documentation. It also runs a dedicated Palworld hosting product, meaning the two biggest survival-game breakout hits of the past two years both have a direct, purpose-built plan on the platform rather than a generic game-server template stretched to fit.

Pricing follows a granular RAM ladder with names borrowed from Minecraft blocks and ores: Dirt at 1 GB for $3.99 a month, up through Iron at 4 GB for $15.99, Emerald at 8 GB for $31.99, and Titan at 16 GB for $63.99. New customers typically see a 30% discount on the first month, which is the source of the “$2.50/month” and “$2.79/month” figures that show up across marketing and review sites; those are promotional first-month rates, not the ongoing price.

Shockbyte’s control panel is also Multicraft-based, styled with the company’s own branding, and backups are user-scheduled rather than fixed to a daily cadence, with one-click restore built into the panel. Where Shockbyte trails the other two is support channel clarity. Its documentation and Trustpilot listing point to a ticket and email system through support@shockbyte.com, but neither the company’s own materials nor the independent reviews checked for this comparison clearly confirm a real-time live chat option the way Apex and Nodecraft both do. With 10,170 Trustpilot reviews and a 4.0 score, Shockbyte carries by far the largest review base of the three, which tends to happen when a low entry price pulls in a high volume of first-time server owners.

Nodecraft: The Only One Built Around Swapping Games

Nodecraft’s defining feature isn’t a price point, it’s a mechanic: Save & Swap. A single Nodecraft plan can run Minecraft one month and switch to ARK, Valheim, Rust, or another supported title the next, without canceling and rebuying a new server. That matters most for households or friend groups that rotate through games in phases rather than committing to one title indefinitely.

Setup speed is Nodecraft’s other headline claim. The company’s own site and its Trustpilot business description both state servers start “in less than 60 seconds,” a figure that, if accurate, beats Apex’s five-minute claim by roughly five times and edges out Shockbyte’s independently tested 2-to-5-minute range as well. None of the sources checked for this piece ran a controlled, stopwatch-timed comparison across all three at once, so treat the ratio as a comparison of each company’s own marketing claims rather than a lab result.

Support is where Nodecraft pulls ahead on paper: it’s the only one of the three offering phone support, reachable at a toll-free US number, though TechRadar’s review notes those phone hours run overnight, from 12:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., which is a strange window for anyone who isn’t already awake troubleshooting a crashed server at 3 a.m. Live chat runs 24/7 alongside that, and email support through support@nodecraft.com rounds out the options. Pricing, as covered above, doesn’t map cleanly to GB tiers, and the company’s front page advertises plans “starting at $9.98 per month” for its base package rather than publishing a 1 GB line item the way Apex and Shockbyte do.

Control Panels Compared: Multicraft vs a Custom Build

Apex and Shockbyte both run on Multicraft, a control panel that’s been the default choice for Minecraft-focused hosts for well over a decade. It’s a known quantity: console access, a file manager, scheduled tasks, and plugin installers, all wrapped in whatever theme the host applies on top. The tradeoff is that Multicraft was built around Minecraft first, and both companies bolt on support for other games rather than designing the panel around them from the start.

Nodecraft’s NodePanel takes the opposite approach. Because it was built to support the Save & Swap feature, the panel treats “which game is this server running” as a setting you can change, not a decision baked in at purchase. That flexibility comes at some cost to the depth of Minecraft-specific tooling that Apex, in particular, has spent over a decade refining, things like MCShield’s Minecraft-tuned filtering or Apex’s especially deep modpack installer library.

For modders specifically, all three still lean on CurseForge as the primary one-click modpack source, with Modrinth support handled more through manual uploads than deep first-party integration across all three hosts as of this comparison. Anyone installing a large modpack should check Modrinth directly for the specific pack they want, since a growing number of popular packs now publish there first and availability between the two platforms doesn’t always match.

Server Locations and Why Latency Still Matters

Ping matters more for a Minecraft or Rust server than most buyers expect going in. A survival world with redstone contraptions and a dozen entities loaded can tolerate a laggy connection, but anything involving PvP, tight combat timing, or a Rust base defense turns 150ms of latency into a real disadvantage. All three providers spread their infrastructure across multiple regions specifically to keep that number low for players scattered across a friend group.

Apex Hosting advertises broad North American and European coverage plus additional nodes in Asia-Pacific and South America, described by multiple 2026 reviews as dozens of worldwide locations, though the exact count shifts as the company adds or retires nodes. Shockbyte runs a similarly wide footprint, commonly cited at more than 20 data center locations spanning North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Oceania. Nodecraft covers fewer regions in total, typically described as several rather than dozens, concentrated in North America and Europe with additional Asia-Pacific coverage.

None of the three publish a definitive, currently-dated list of every active data center, and location counts change often enough that a number quoted in one review can be outdated within months. The practical takeaway: for a friend group spread across the US and Europe, all three offer a nearby enough node that the choice between them shouldn’t come down to latency alone. For a group specifically in a smaller region like South America or Southeast Asia, checking each provider’s live location list before buying is worth the extra five minutes, since coverage there is thinner and more likely to have changed.

How the 2026 Memory Market Is Shaping Hosting Prices

None of the pricing tables above exist in a vacuum. DDR5 memory prices have climbed sharply through 2026 as AI data center demand pulls supply away from consumer and hosting-grade RAM, a trend this site has tracked in detail in coverage of DDR5 hitting $400 for a 32GB kit as prices soared. Managed game server hosts buy RAM in bulk for their fleets, and a sustained price spike upstream eventually shows up in monthly plan pricing, even for hosts that lock in hardware contracts months ahead of a rate change.

None of Apex, Shockbyte, or Nodecraft has announced a memory-crisis-driven price hike specific to 2026 in the sources checked for this piece, and the RAM-tier pricing quoted throughout this comparison reflects rates gathered from current 2026 review data rather than older, pre-crisis figures. That said, buyers locking in an annual plan at today’s rate are arguably hedging against further RAM cost increases the same way a fixed-rate mortgage hedges against rising interest, which is worth factoring in for anyone deciding between a monthly and annual billing cycle on any of these three platforms.

Games Each Host Actually Supports Beyond Minecraft

Anyone comparing these three for a non-Minecraft server needs current information, since game catalogs on all three hosts expand every time a new survival or crafting title breaks out. As of this comparison, here’s what each one confirms:

Apex Hosting: ARK: Survival Evolved and Ascended, Rust, Valheim, CS2, Conan Exiles, Terraria, Unturned, Project Zomboid, Satisfactory, 7 Days to Die, Factorio, Palworld, Starbound, The Forest, V Rising, and more, per the company’s own games page.
Shockbyte: Official Rust hosting partner for Facepunch Studios, dedicated Palworld plans, plus ARK, Valheim, Terraria, and a catalog the company markets as covering 60-plus games total.
Nodecraft: Minecraft, ARK, Rust, Valheim, Terraria, 7 Days to Die, Factorio, Project Zomboid, and other titles, all switchable on one plan through Save & Swap rather than requiring a separate purchase per game.

Two competitors worth knowing about even though they sit outside this three-way comparison: BisectHosting, another Minecraft-focused host with deep CurseForge modpack integration and pricing in a similar range to Apex, and Hostinger’s game hosting product, which bundles game servers into its broader web hosting ecosystem at competitive entry pricing for buyers already using Hostinger for other services.

Setup Speed, Uptime, and DDoS Protection Compared

Every managed host in this space promises fast deployment and near-perfect uptime, so the details matter more than the marketing copy. Nodecraft’s under-60-second claim is the most aggressive of the three and appears consistently across its own site and its Trustpilot business profile. Apex’s five-minute figure shows up in both its own marketing and in Findstack’s independent review, which also credits Apex with a 99.99% uptime commitment, slightly above the 99.9% target both Shockbyte and Nodecraft advertise. Shockbyte lands in between on speed, with independent testing from GameHostingGuides clocking real-world deployment at two to five minutes despite the company’s own “instant” language.

DDoS protection ships standard on all plans across all three hosts, which has been true industry-wide for years now given how routine attacks against public Minecraft servers have become. Apex is the only one of the three to publish a specific mitigation capacity, citing protection against attacks up to 300 Gbps. Shockbyte and Nodecraft both describe their protection as always-on and network-level without disclosing a comparable throughput figure, which isn’t unusual since most budget hosts treat exact DDoS capacity as a competitive secret rather than a marketing point.

None of the three publish a public, third-party-audited uptime history the way enterprise cloud providers do. The 99.9% and 99.99% figures quoted throughout this piece are company-stated targets rather than measured, independently verified results, and readers should treat them accordingly.

Customer Support and Trustpilot Scores in Detail

Support quality is the single hardest thing to compare fairly across hosting companies, since review platforms skew toward people who had either a great experience or a terrible one. With that caveat, the numbers here are still worth laying out plainly.

Provider	Trustpilot score	Review count	Live chat	Phone	Ticket/email
Apex Hosting	4.3 / 5	~8,120	Yes, 24/7	No	Yes
Shockbyte	4.0 / 5	~10,170	Unclear	No	Yes
Nodecraft	4.9 / 5	~1,787	Yes, 24/7	Yes, overnight US hours only	Yes

Nodecraft’s rating is the standout number, and the reasons behind it come up repeatedly in reviews: fast phone and chat response, a genuinely different product in Save & Swap, and a smaller customer base that skews toward users who specifically sought out a multi-game host rather than the cheapest possible Minecraft plan. Shockbyte’s lower relative score paired with its much larger review count reads less like a quality problem and more like the natural effect of serving the largest, most price-sensitive slice of the market, where support tickets scale faster than support teams do. Apex sits closest to the middle on both scale and score, consistent with its position as a long-running, broadly reviewed but not budget-first provider.

Real-World Use Cases: Which Host Fits Which Server

The right answer depends less on which host scores highest overall and more on what the server is actually for. Here’s how the three shake out across the situations that come up most often.

A small vanilla survival server for five friends

A 2 GB plan handles vanilla Minecraft for a handful of players comfortably. At this size, Nodecraft’s Budget-tier estimate (~$6/mo) and Shockbyte’s Sand tier ($7.99/mo, often discounted to $5.59 for the first month) both undercut Apex’s $7.49 plan, making price the deciding factor when the feature set barely matters at this scale.

A heavily modded FTB or Pixelmon server

This is Apex’s home turf. The one-click modpack installer library and MCShield’s Minecraft-tuned protection were built specifically for this use case, and the 4 GB to 8 GB range ($14.99 to $29.99) covers most popular modpacks without needing the largest, most expensive tiers.

A public, high-traffic server that expects to get attacked

Apex’s published 300 Gbps DDoS mitigation figure gives server owners a concrete number to point to, which matters more once a server’s IP address becomes public knowledge in a community Discord or a server-list site. Shockbyte and Nodecraft both include protection too, but neither publishes a comparable capacity claim.

A household that rotates between ARK, Valheim, and Rust

Nodecraft’s Save & Swap feature exists exactly for this pattern. Paying for one plan that becomes whichever game the group is currently playing beats paying for three separate idle servers across three different hosts, or canceling and rebuying every time interest shifts to a new title.

A Rust or Palworld community built around an existing Discord

Shockbyte’s official Facepunch partnership for Rust and its dedicated Palworld product make it the most purpose-built option for either game specifically, rather than a Minecraft host with survival-game support added later.

A first-time server owner who isn’t sure what they need yet

Apex’s seven-day money-back guarantee gives first-timers a real out if the server turns out to be the wrong size or the group loses interest fast, something neither Shockbyte’s promotional pricing nor Nodecraft’s refund-on-request policy states as clearly upfront.

A content creator who needs the server up before a scheduled stream

Nodecraft’s under-60-second setup claim matters most here. A streamer announcing a new server launch to an audience can’t afford a five-minute dead-air wait while a control panel provisions, and even Shockbyte’s faster “instant” tier still tests slower in independent reviews than Nodecraft’s own stated benchmark. Whether that gap is noticeable in practice depends on how tightly the stream schedule is planned around the launch moment.

Migration Guide: Moving a Server Between Hosts

Switching providers doesn’t mean losing a world, base, or hours of progress, as long as the migration happens in the right order. Here’s the process that works across Apex, Shockbyte, and Nodecraft, since all three store Minecraft worlds as standard folder structures underneath their respective panels.

Stop the server on the current host through its control panel before touching any files, to avoid copying a world mid-write and corrupting chunk data.
Trigger a full manual backup through the panel’s Backups tab, even if an automatic one ran recently, to get a clean, timestamped archive to work from.
Download the world folder, along with any plugin or mod configuration files, through the panel’s file manager or an SFTP client.
Note the exact server version, whether Java or Bedrock, and the specific modpack or plugin list, since a version mismatch on the new host is the most common cause of a corrupted world on first launch.
Sign up for the new plan sized to match or exceed the RAM tier the world was running on, since undersizing a modded world after migration tends to cause crashes almost immediately.
Upload the world folder to the new host’s server directory using its file manager or SFTP.
Reinstall the exact same mods or plugins in the same versions before starting the server for the first time, matching the list documented in step 4.
Start the server and check the console log closely for missing dependency or version-mismatch errors before inviting players back in.
Update the server address shared with players, and if using a custom domain, point its DNS record at the new host’s IP.
Keep the old host’s plan active for a few days as a fallback until the migrated world is confirmed stable under normal play.

For anyone comfortable with a terminal, an SFTP-based transfer between two Linux-backed panels can also be scripted directly, which saves time on larger modded worlds that can run into multiple gigabytes:

sftp -P 2022 username@old-host-ip
get -r /home/container/world /local/backup/world
sftp -P 2022 username@new-host-ip
put -r /local/backup/world /home/container/world

Port numbers and directory paths vary by host and panel, so check each provider’s knowledgebase for the exact SFTP port and file path before running a transfer like this, since guessing wrong risks overwriting the wrong directory.

Apex Hosting: Pros and Cons

Pro: Deepest modpack installer library of the three, with one-click FTB, Pixelmon, and SkyFactory support.
Pro: Published DDoS mitigation figure of up to 300 Gbps gives concrete reassurance for public servers.
Pro: Seven-day money-back guarantee removes risk for first-time buyers.
Con: No phone support, and backup retention windows aren’t publicly disclosed.
Con: Mid-pack pricing at every RAM tier tested, never the cheapest option available.

Shockbyte: Pros and Cons

Pro: Official Facepunch partnership for Rust hosting and a dedicated Palworld product.
Pro: Cheapest published entry price of the three at the 1 GB and 2 GB tiers.
Pro: Largest Trustpilot review base by a wide margin, meaning more data points to judge it by.
Con: Lowest Trustpilot score of the three at 4.0 / 5.
Con: Live chat support isn’t clearly confirmed across the company’s own materials or independent reviews.

Nodecraft: Pros and Cons

Pro: Save & Swap lets one plan run multiple games without a separate purchase per title.
Pro: Highest Trustpilot rating of the three at 4.9 / 5, plus the only phone support option.
Pro: Fastest claimed setup time at under 60 seconds.
Con: Smallest review base of the three, making the high rating harder to weigh against real sample size.
Con: No clean, published RAM-tier pricing table, which makes upfront cost comparison harder than with Apex or Shockbyte.

The Verdict: Which Game Server Host Should You Choose

There’s no single winner here, because the three providers aren’t really competing on the same axis. Pick Apex Hosting for a heavily modded Minecraft server or any project where a documented DDoS mitigation figure and a deep modpack library matter more than shaving a few dollars off the monthly bill. Pick Shockbyte if budget comes first and the server is running Rust or Palworld specifically, given the official Facepunch partnership and dedicated product pages for both. Pick Nodecraft if the group’s game of choice changes every few months, since Save & Swap is the only feature among the three that actually solves that problem instead of asking you to buy a new plan every time.

Judged purely on the numbers gathered here, Apex earns the highest confidence for anyone prioritizing published security specs and modpack depth, Shockbyte wins on raw price and game-specific partnerships, and Nodecraft wins on speed, support access, and flexibility for multi-game households. All three carry acceptable Trustpilot standing, none of them has a track record of major public outages, and the actual cost difference between them at any given RAM tier rarely exceeds a few dollars a month, which means the deciding factor should be the feature that matches how the server will actually get used, not the sticker price alone.

For readers who decide managed hosting isn’t the right fit after all, self-hosted alternatives remain viable too. The AWS game server hosting setup guide on this site walks through running a server on raw cloud infrastructure, and the Minecraft Java vs. Bedrock comparison is worth reading first for anyone still deciding which edition to build around before picking a host at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Apex Hosting only for Minecraft?

No. While Apex built its reputation on Minecraft and modded servers specifically, its current catalog covers more than 20 additional titles including ARK: Survival Evolved and Ascended, Rust, Valheim, CS2, Conan Exiles, Project Zomboid, and Palworld, according to the company’s own games page.

Does Shockbyte really support Palworld and Rust?

Yes to both. Shockbyte runs a dedicated Palworld hosting product and holds an official partnership with Facepunch Studios to provide Rust dedicated server hosting, a relationship confirmed on Facepunch’s own support documentation for the Shockbyte partnership.

What is Nodecraft’s Save & Swap feature?

Save & Swap lets a single Nodecraft server plan switch between supported games without requiring a new purchase. A group could run Minecraft for a few months, then switch the same plan over to ARK or Valheim when interest shifts, instead of maintaining separate idle servers for each game.

Which of the three has the best uptime?

Apex advertises the highest target at up to 99.99%, compared with 99.9% targets from both Shockbyte and Nodecraft. None of the three publish independently audited uptime histories, so these figures reflect company-stated goals rather than measured, third-party-verified results.

Can I move my Minecraft world from one of these hosts to another?

Yes. All three store Minecraft worlds in standard folder structures accessible through each panel’s file manager or SFTP, which means a world, its plugins, and its configuration files can be downloaded from one host and uploaded to another as long as the server version matches on both ends.

Why does Nodecraft have the highest Trustpilot score but the fewest reviews?

Nodecraft’s 4.9 / 5 rating rests on roughly 1,787 reviews, far fewer than Shockbyte’s 10,170 or Apex’s 8,120. A smaller, more specialized customer base focused on Nodecraft’s multi-game flexibility can sustain a higher average score more easily than a provider serving a much larger, more price-sensitive audience, so the score and the sample size should both factor into how much weight a reader gives the rating.

Do any of these three offer a free trial?

None of them offer an open-ended free trial. Apex backs its plans with a seven-day money-back guarantee instead, Shockbyte relies on deep first-month promotional discounts rather than a trial, and Nodecraft handles refund requests on a case-by-case basis rather than publishing a fixed trial period.

Is it cheaper to self-host a Minecraft server instead of using any of these three?

It can be cheaper in raw dollar terms if a spare PC is already available and left running anyway, but self-hosting adds port forwarding, uptime responsibility, and manual backup management that managed hosts handle automatically. For a server that needs to stay online reliably for a group of players who aren’t in the same house, the monthly fee typically buys enough convenience to justify the cost over a self-hosted setup on home internet.