Stop paying while nobody is playing: auto-sleep on uniz.host

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 its state reads Asleep rather than Stopped, 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 is switched off, which means "never auto-sleep" — and nothing in the creation flow switches it on. 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 server page says so too. While the switch is off, the Running cost box on the Overview tab carries an Auto-sleep is off row explaining that the server keeps charging until you stop it, with an Open settings button that goes straight to that server's sleep group.

There are two ways to set it:

Anything outside that range cannot be saved; it is never 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 Sleep, wake and schedule group on the Settings tab

From /dashboard/servers, open the server, choose the Settings tab, then the Sleep, wake and schedule group. Its first section is Sleep when nobody plays. You can also type "sleep" into Search settings at the top, or press Open settings on the warning row on the Overview tab — both land in the same place. 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.

Switch it on and enter the minutes

Turn on the Sleep when nobody plays switch in the section header, then type the number of idle minutes you want to allow into Sleep after nobody plays for, between 5 and 120. To stop using it later, switch it off again. With the switch on and the minutes empty or out of range, the save is refused with Enter the minutes (5–120), or switch it off if it should not sleep.

Fifteen to thirty minutes suits most groups. On a server that sits empty most of the day a short window saves the most, but it also sleeps during a long build break, and every sleep ends the billing round (see below) — so on a server that is busy most of the day it can cost more than a longer window or none. Long windows are gentler on players but keep billing while the server sits empty.

Save and check the warning row is gone

Once you change a value, a save bar appears at the bottom of the group. Press Save. 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 row disappearing from the Running cost box on the Overview tab.

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. Sleep message (MOTD) sits in the General group next to the running MOTD and is what a sleeping server shows in the server list; Message while waking (kick message) sits under the sleep switch in Sleep, wake and schedule and 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 page hides fields that would be lies for a given game.

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 Who can wake it (Wake allowlist) 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". A Core Keeper server's Sleep, wake and schedule group shows a This server never auto-sleeps warning instead: there is no minutes field, and its sleep switch cannot be turned on.

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, with no fee on top — but the sleep before it ended the server's billing rounds, so the wake starts fresh ones (below).

Charges are capped, so a server left running by accident cannot run away with your balance: each size has a cap per 24-hour round and a cap per 1-month round, and the hourly charge never goes past the cap of the round it falls in. A round starts when the server is turned on, and once it reaches the cap the server runs free until the round ends. For example, the 2 GB plan is ฿0.50/hour and at most ฿7 per 24-hour round — left on for a whole 24-hour round 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.

Every sleep, like every stop you cause, ends both rounds, and the next wake starts new ones: a capped round's free time is lost at the sleep, and a server that would otherwise run all day or all month can pay more with auto-sleep on than off. A restart does not end a round (see how rounds are counted).

Two smaller things worth knowing:

• "Restart the server" and "Run a console command" tasks never wake a sleeping server. If a nightly restart comes due while the server is asleep, that run is skipped. A "Start the server" task does wake a sleeping server, and it bills as usual until auto-sleep puts the server back to sleep, if auto-sleep is on, or until somebody stops it.
• 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 within 90 days after archiving (30 if you have never topped up), after which the server's data is deleted, and it 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.

Read next

• How much RAM does a game server need — the size you pick sets the hourly rate that sleeping saves you.
• Running a Minecraft server and running a Palworld server — the two pipelines described above, in full.
• Pricing — current hourly rates and caps per size.