Stop paying while nobody is playing: auto-sleep on uniz.host
Stop paying while nobody is playing: auto-sleep on uniz.host
Last updated 2026-08-14
Short answer
A uniz.host server bills credits only while it is running, so the way to stop paying overnight is to make it stop running. Auto-sleep does that for you, but it is OFF by default on every new server — the field is Auto-sleep after (minutes) on the server's Settings tab, and it accepts 0 (never) or 5–120. The change applies live, with no restart. When the server is asleep, the first join attempt wakes it: the player waits for the boot and then joins a second time.
Steps at a glance
Open the Settings tab of the server
Set the auto-sleep window in minutes
Save and check the sleep-off banner is gone
Tell your players how the first join works
Contents
Contents
Hosting bills by the hour on uniz.host, and the hour only counts while the server is actually running — the billing window opens when the server reaches the running state and closes again the moment it stops. So the whole answer to "how do I stop paying while nobody is playing?" is: make the server stop running when the last player leaves. Auto-sleep does exactly that, and then brings the server back when somebody tries to join. What follows is where the setting lives, what your players will experience, and the places where it behaves differently from what you might assume.
What sleeping actually is
Sleeping is not a low-power mode or a paused container. When the sleep window expires, the platform shuts the game down exactly the same way a manual stop does, then scales the server to zero. In the dashboard it appears as a Sleeping server rather than a stopped one, because the platform records that it stopped itself for being idle rather than because you pressed Stop.
Two consequences follow from that, and both are the point of the feature:
A sleeping server bills nothing for compute. Putting the server to sleep closes the billing window in the same operation that shuts it down. There is no hourly charge again until it is running again.
Nothing is lost. The world lives on the server's own disk, untouched. Mods, configs, player data, backups — all of it is still there when the server comes back.
The difference between sleeping and stopped matters for one reason: only a sleeping server can be woken by a player joining. A server you stopped by hand stays down until you start it again — that is deliberate, so a player cannot override an owner who deliberately took the server offline. The same applies to a server the platform stopped because the account ran out of credits.
Auto-sleep is off until you turn it on
This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth being blunt about it: a new server never sleeps by itself. The sleep window is stored per server and its default value is 0, which means "never auto-sleep" — and nothing in the creation flow sets it to anything else. Until you change it, the server behaves exactly like a machine you left switched on: it runs, and it bills, until you stop it or the credits run out.
The dashboard says so too. On a running server with the window at 0, the detail page shows an Auto-sleep is off banner explaining that the server will keep billing until you stop it yourself, with a shortcut into the settings.
The field accepts two kinds of value:
Value
What happens
0
Never sleeps. The server stays online until you stop it, or credits run out.
5 – 120
Sleeps after that many minutes with no players online.
Anything outside that range is rejected by the API rather than quietly rounded. The 5-minute floor exists to stop a server from flapping between asleep and awake all evening, and the 120-minute ceiling exists because a window longer than two hours is barely cheaper than leaving it on.
Switching auto-sleep on
Open the Settings tab of the server
From /dashboard/servers, open the server, then choose the Settings tab. The card you want is Sleep settings. You need to be the owner, or a team member who was granted the settings permission — the default permissions for a new team invite do not include it.
Set the auto-sleep window in minutes
The field is labelled Auto-sleep after (minutes). Type the number of idle minutes you want to allow, between 5 and 120, or 0 to switch the feature off again. The helper text under the field changes with the value, so you can confirm the field understood you: with 0 it tells you auto-sleep is off, and with any real window it describes the wake behaviour.
Fifteen to thirty minutes suits most groups. Short windows save the most money but sleep during a long build break; long windows are gentler on players but keep billing.
Save and check the sleep-off banner is gone
Press Save settings. The change is written immediately, and — unusually for this page — it applies without a restart. The sweep that decides which servers are idle reads the number live on its next pass, so the running game is not touched at all. Almost everything else on a server (game settings, mods, the server icon) waits for the next restart; this one does not.
The confirmation you are looking for is the Auto-sleep is off banner disappearing from the server's page.
Tell your players how the first join works
This is the step everyone skips, and it generates most of the "the server is broken" messages. See the next section for exactly what to tell them.
The first join wakes it — the second one gets in
When a sleeping server is asleep, there is no game process listening. Something has to notice the join attempt and start the server, and starting a game server takes time — seconds for small vanilla worlds, minutes for a large modpack, and up to roughly twenty minutes for a Palworld server that has to install or validate its game files first.
So the honest description is: the first join attempt is the wake signal, and it does not get in. The player sees the server refuse or time out, waits, and joins a second time. That second attempt is the one that connects. This is not a failure state, and telling your group about it once saves a lot of confusion later.
There is one thing you can do to make the wait pleasant: fill in the two message fields on the same settings card. Sleep message (MOTD) is what a sleeping server shows in the server list, and Wake kick message is what a player sees when their join lands while the server is still coming up — for example "waking up, try again in a minute". Both fall back to a platform default if you leave them empty.
Why the experience differs by game
A sleeping server has no game process, so whatever a joining player sees comes from the small piece of infrastructure standing in front of the port. There are three of those, and they genuinely differ in what they can do — which is why the settings card hides fields that would be lies for a given game.
Server
What stands in front while asleep
Server-list message
Message to a joining player
Wake allowlist
Minecraft Java
mc-router, matching on the hostname
Yes
Yes
Yes
Minecraft Bedrock, and Java with Bedrock crossplay
the RakNet wake catcher, on the server's own UDP port
Yes
Best-effort
No
Palworld
the raw-UDP wake catcher
No
No
No
Read left to right, that means:
Minecraft Java goes through mc-router, which routes by the hostname the client typed. It is the only pipeline that learns who is knocking, which is why Wake allowlist (usernames) appears for Java servers only: you can list the usernames allowed to wake the server, and everyone else's join is refused rather than costing you a boot.
Bedrock and Java-with-crossplay servers are held by a catcher that speaks RakNet, the protocol the Bedrock server list uses. It answers list pings with your sleep message, and it deliberately never wakes on a ping — a Bedrock client pings every saved server continuously while the server list is open, so waking on pings would wake every server your players ever saved. Only a completed connection, meaning a genuine join, wakes anything. The kick message is best-effort: it is a game packet whose format shifts between Minecraft releases, so if it cannot be delivered the player simply times out — and the wake has already fired regardless.
Palworld dials a UDP port directly and speaks Unreal netcode, which the catcher does not parse at all. It therefore cannot answer a server-list ping and has nowhere to put a message, so both message fields are hidden for Palworld servers. It treats two datagrams from the same source within five seconds as a real join — a deliberate money guard, because these ports face the open internet and a single stray scanner packet must not be able to boot a customer's server. Wakes are also limited to one per port per minute.
Core Keeper is the exception
Core Keeper is the one game where this setting does nothing at all. The game exposes no way for the platform to ask how many players are online, and the platform will never sleep a server it cannot prove is empty — a probe that fails is treated as "unknown", never as "empty". The settings card says so in place of the usual hint.
For a Core Keeper server, stop it yourself from the Overview tab when you finish playing. That is the only way to stop the meter on that game, and it is worth making a habit of it at the end of each session.
What this does to your bill
Hourly billing runs only while the server is in the running state, and boot time is not billed — the window opens when the server reaches running, not when you press Start. A wake therefore costs you the hours actually played, not a penalty.
Charges are capped, so a server left running by accident cannot run away with your balance: each plan has a daily cap and a monthly cap, and the caps apply before the raw hourly accrual. For example, the 2 GB plan is ฿0.50/hour with a ฿7 daily cap — a full 24-hour day on it costs ฿7, not ฿12. Those are the compiled-in defaults and hardware classes differ, so check /pricing for the current rates on the size you want.
Two smaller things worth knowing:
Scheduled tasks never wake a sleeping server. If you have a nightly restart or a timed start scheduled, that run is skipped while the server is asleep rather than booting it — precisely so an automation cannot bill you for a server nobody asked to open.
A server that stays stopped for seven days is archived — or after one day if the account has never made a real top-up. Its world is packed away to storage and the server shows a restore action instead of a start button; restoring is free and brings the world back so the server resumes normally, as covered in archived servers. A server that sleeps and gets woken regularly never reaches this point.
Why is my server still billing overnight when nobody plays?
Almost certainly because auto-sleep was never switched on. Every new server is created with the window set to 0, which means never sleep — it stays online and keeps billing until somebody stops it. Set the field to a value between 5 and 120 minutes and the server puts itself to sleep once nobody has been online for that long.
Does a sleeping server lose my world?
No. Sleeping only shuts the game process down; the world stays on the server's own disk, and the shutdown is the same one a manual stop performs. Waking it starts the same world back up.
Do I have to restart the server after changing the sleep window?
No — this is one of the very few settings that applies live. The sweep that decides when to sleep reads the new number on its next pass, so nothing about the running game is touched. Most other settings on a server do need a restart.
Why did my friend have to join twice?
That is the design, not a bug. The first join is what wakes the server — the game has not booted yet, so that attempt cannot succeed. The player waits for the boot (seconds for a small vanilla server, several minutes for a big modpack or a Palworld world) and joins again.
Will a random port scan on the internet wake my server and bill me?
For Palworld the wake needs two datagrams from the same source within five seconds, specifically so a one-shot scanner probe cannot trigger it, and a wake can fire at most once per minute per port. On the Bedrock side, a server-list ping never wakes anything — only a completed connection does.
What happens if I run out of credits?
The platform stops the server itself and marks it stopped for billing, not idle — and a join cannot wake a server in that state. Top up and start it again from the dashboard.