Creating a Minecraft server means choosing between self hosting on hardware you already own and renting a hosted game server with a public address. Self hosting is free apart from electricity but requires installing Java 21, running the official server jar in its own directory, accepting the end user licence agreement, and forwarding TCP port 25565 from the router to the local machine, while exposing the household public IP address. Hosted servers provide a datacenter address, an open port, DDoS filtering and continuous uptime. In both cases the important configuration lives in server.properties, where view distance and simulation distance dominate performance, online mode protects against account spoofing and the whitelist provides the simplest griefing defence. Paper replaces the vanilla jar without changing gameplay and supports Bukkit plugins such as EssentialsX, LuckPerms and CoreProtect, while Fabric and Forge are used for modpacks and require every client to run matching versions. Memory should be allocated with matching minimum and maximum heap values and never more than about three quarters of physical RAM.