Son is hinting he would like to have his own Minecraft realm, like some of his friends have. I set one up on a Raspberry Pi following online instructions a couple of years ago just to see if I could do it. It seems pretty straightforward.

I started looking again this month, and it looks like another option is cloud hosting (for a monthly fee). Anyone have any advice on either option? Our internet provider is Spectrum if that make any difference.Max users would probably be 10 or fewer.

A cloud solution would be the cheapest unless you have an old computer sitting around that can run the server. With 10 users you might want to research what the upload speed would need to be to support that and make sure your internet connection can handle it.

My Raspberry Pi still works pretty well but I haven't had 10 players on mine to see if it can handle it. I recommend using a Pi 4 with at least 4GB of RAM if you want to go back to that route. It does struggle a little bit when loading new chunks, but it's not terrible. The benefits of a Raspberry Pi is you don't pay a monthly fee, just electricity. Downside is you've got to dab in some Linux commands for updating and figure out porting. I recommend buying a domain on NameCheap that routes to your IP address so you don't give his friends your IP address.

Cloud Hosting is probably the easiest route as they provide all the tools and is not too expensive per month. And you get a much more powerful server than Raspberry Pi that can handle a lot of activities within the game.

One other thing to note is there's two different versions of Minecraft. All of this stuff above is for Minecraft Java for computers. Java does do Realms but you can't do a whole lot of modding and it doesn't cross platform to Consoles. Then there's the Bedrock Version which works on Consoles, PC (From Windows Store), and Mobile. The only way to host its to buy a Realm from Microsoft in the game and only holds up to 10 players. Make sure you know what version of Minecraft your son is using.

To be clear, I was thinking of upcycling an older computer we don't need anymore to be the server,, not using a Pi. I only did the Pi to learn how to to it. I found it wasn't too reliable after about three players joined. Even on player with a could lock it up some times..

There is a plugin that is supposed to allow Bedrock and Java editions to play together. It is called Geyser. Still looking into that issue.

I have a Shockbyte Minecraft server. Only $2.50/month