Apex Hosting vs Shockbyte: You're Buying RAM, But TPS Is a CPU Problem

Every Minecraft host sells plans by the gigabyte, and every comparison ranks them on price per gigabyte. Both of those are reasonable and neither measures the thing your players actually feel.

Minecraft’s server simulation runs mostly on a single main thread, so tick rate is limited by single-core CPU performance. Adding RAM does not raise TPS. It helps only when you were memory-starved and garbage-collection pauses were stalling the tick — real, but a fix for a specific problem rather than a performance dial.

Which means the industry-standard metric — dollars per gigabyte — tells you what you’re paying, not what you’re getting. Neither Apex nor Shockbyte prominently publishes the CPU clock speeds that actually govern your server’s smoothness.

So this comparison does two things: sizes RAM properly so you stop over-buying it, and compares the two on the axes that are genuinely verifiable.

How much RAM you actually need

RAM sizing is arithmetic: a base allocation for the server type, plus a per-player allowance.

Above roughly 25 concurrent players, diminishing returns apply and each additional player costs somewhat less.

Worked out to realistic targets:

The gap between vanilla and heavy modded is the whole story of your bill. A vanilla server for five friends needs 2–4 GB and costs pocket money at either host. A heavy modpack for twenty players needs 20 GB+ and costs real money — and that’s where the price-per-gigabyte difference between these two compounds into something worth choosing over.

Price per gigabyte

At the budget tier Shockbyte is roughly half Apex’s rate; at its premium tier the two are within pennies of each other. Apex’s flat $3.75/GB through the middle of the range is at least predictable — you can plan an upgrade without re-reading a pricing page.

Priced against the sizing table, a Paper server for 20–30 players wants about 8 GB: roughly $30/month at Apex, roughly $16/month on Shockbyte’s budget tier. Over a year that’s a $168 difference for the same nominal memory.

Where the money actually goes: DDoS

For a public Minecraft server this matters more than the price gap, and it’s the clearest split between them.

Apex includes DDoS protection on every plan with no upsell, covering both layer 4 and layer 7, on Cloudflare Spectrum. Shockbyte also includes DDoS protection, but published comparisons describe it as reasonable mitigation that is not Cloudflare Spectrum.

That distinction is worth understanding rather than taking on trust. As we covered in our DDoS-protected VPS guide, layer 4 protection stops volumetric floods while layer 7 addresses application-level attacks — and Minecraft servers are attacked constantly, often by players who dislike a moderation decision. Game protocols run on UDP, which generic scrubbing handles poorly, so protection tuned for the game matters.

If your server is public and advertised, that’s the line item to buy on. If it’s whitelisted for friends, it’s close to irrelevant and you should buy on price.

Panel, modpacks and support

Both advertise one-click installers covering modpacks and plugins — Shockbyte’s homepage lists an “Instant Modpack & Plugin Installer” alongside instant setup and 24/7 support, so this isn’t the differentiator some comparisons make it. Both include automatic backups as standard.

Where Apex is credited with an edge is version switching driven from the panel rather than through a support ticket. That’s the detail people underestimate: on a modded server you will change versions, and doing it yourself at 11pm beats waiting in a queue.

Shockbyte competes on simplicity and terms — a 72-hour self-serve refund, a stated 99.9% uptime, and billing toggles that take 10% off quarterly and 30% off annual terms. That annual discount materially changes the price comparison above if you’re willing to commit.

Shockbyte’s feature strip is worth reading before assuming Apex owns the tooling advantage — and note the -30% annual toggle.

The consensus in published comparisons is consistent and matches our own ranking: Shockbyte wins on budget and simplicity; Apex wins on mod support, panel polish and support responsiveness. For pure vanilla Minecraft under about 30 players, Shockbyte is the better value. For anything modded or public-facing, Apex’s package justifies the premium.

Measure TPS yourself

Since RAM tiers don’t tell you about tick rate, measure it. On Paper or Spigot, in-game or from the console:

/tps

20 TPS is the ceiling and the target — it means the server is completing 20 ticks per second as designed. Sustained figures below about 18 are noticeable as rubber-banding and delayed block breaking; below 15 the server feels broken.

For diagnosis rather than a headline number:

/timings on      # then /timings paste after ~10 minutes of real load

Timings reports show which plugins, entities or chunk operations are consuming tick budget — and the answer is very often a specific plugin or a mob farm rather than the host.

We have not benchmarked TPS on matched plans at these two providers. Doing it credibly needs identical modpacks, identical world seeds and dozens of concurrent players at both hosts simultaneously, and the result would still describe the particular machines we landed on. The /tps command on a trial server tells you something true about the hardware you’d actually be renting.

The verdict

Apex Hosting for public servers, modded servers, and anyone who’d rather change Minecraft versions from a panel than a ticket. The Cloudflare Spectrum DDoS protection on every plan is the strongest single argument, and it’s the one that matters when a server gets popular enough to attract attention. It’s also our top pick in the wider Minecraft hosting comparison.

Shockbyte for private and small vanilla servers where the budget tier’s ~$1.99/GB roughly halves the bill for the same memory. If you’re running Paper for a dozen friends behind a whitelist, the premium buys you very little.

Neither, if your problem is TPS on a heavy modpack. More gigabytes from either host won’t fix a single-threaded tick budget. Trim plugins, cap mob farms, reduce view distance, and read a timings report before upgrading the plan.

Check Apex Hosting → · Read our Apex review

Check Shockbyte →

How we picked

Pricing, DDoS provision, backup policy and panel features come from each provider’s pages and from published comparisons read in August 2026. RAM sizing figures are published community and host guidance — base allocation plus per-player allowance — rather than our own instrumentation.

We did not run TPS benchmarks. The brief for this comparison was to publish tick-rate data from matched Paper and Forge servers at 5, 15 and 30 players, and that requires paid accounts at both hosts plus dozens of concurrent testers. We’ve given you the /tps and /timings method instead, which produces numbers for the hardware you’re actually renting.

We’ve also flagged rather than repeated the Cloudflare Spectrum comparison as settled fact — it comes from published third-party reviews, and DDoS arrangements change. Confirm with each host if it’s decisive for you.

Both links here are affiliate links. Note that the recommendation for the largest group of readers — small private vanilla servers — points at the cheaper of the two.

FAQ

Is Apex Hosting or Shockbyte better?

Apex for modded, public or version-switching-heavy servers, largely on the strength of Cloudflare Spectrum DDoS protection included on every plan and a panel that handles modpacks and versions without tickets. Shockbyte for private vanilla servers, where its budget tier at roughly $1.99/GB is about half Apex’s $3.75/GB.

How much RAM does my Minecraft server need?

Base plus per-player: vanilla 2 GB + 200 MB per peak player, Paper 2.5 GB + 200 MB, Forge/Fabric 4 GB + 300 MB, heavy modpacks 6 GB + 350 MB. In practice, 2–4 GB for a handful of vanilla friends, 4–8 GB for Paper with 10–30 players, and 12–16 GB for modded with 20 — rising past 20 GB for packs like All the Mods 9 or RLCraft.

Does more RAM increase TPS?

No, not directly. Minecraft’s simulation runs mostly on a single thread, so tick rate is governed by single-core CPU performance. Extra RAM only helps if you were memory-starved and suffering garbage-collection pauses. If your TPS is low and memory isn’t exhausted, a bigger plan won’t fix it.

What is a good TPS for a Minecraft server?

20 TPS is the maximum and the target. Sustained values below 18 produce visible lag — rubber-banding, delayed block breaking — and below 15 the server feels broken. Check it with /tps on Paper or Spigot.

Do both hosts include DDoS protection and backups?

Both include DDoS protection and automatic backups as standard. The difference is in the DDoS implementation: Apex is described as using Cloudflare Spectrum with layer 4 and layer 7 coverage on every plan, while Shockbyte’s is characterised as reasonable mitigation without Spectrum. For a public server, that difference is the main thing separating them.

Which is cheaper for a modpack server?

Shockbyte’s budget tier, on price per gigabyte — and modpacks need a lot of gigabytes, so the gap compounds. A 20 GB heavy-modpack server is where the roughly $1.99/GB versus $3.75/GB difference becomes hundreds of dollars a year. Weigh that against Apex’s modpack tooling and DDoS coverage.